Sweet T. and Biscuits

It Happened To Me And I Did Everything Right, Right?

2012-02-02T00:41:00.000-08:00

Title IX. The DKE incident. Patrick Witt. Rape culture. Hookup culture. Sex Week versus True Love Week. Just Say No (To Awful Sex). No matter the venue, no matter the cause, we love to talk about Yale’s sexual culture. We repost the articles we love, we criticize the articles we hate. We get offended. We argue. We ruin dinner with our overheated debates. Those who refuse to take part in Yale’s sex culture are often not above passing judgment on those who do, which in turn offends the sexually active, whose activities range from loving and committed to fun and casual (and possibly regretful, depending on the circumstances. Regardless of our level of sexual activity, however, we all generally agree that sex should be between consenting adults who have all manner of control over their own situation (whatever their own definition of that may be). Rape is a terrible, ugly thing, and none of us want that for our fellow friends, loved ones, or classmates.

The issues of consent and proper signaling, however, are often murkier and more heavily debated. Is it rape if she says yes and she’s drunk? Can you truly consent if you feel a certain amount of pressure? Is she exaggerating or was it really that bad? Did her peers/dean/advisors tell her to keep quiet? Is she doing this for attention? I mean, if it really was that bad then of course I support her, 100%, but what’s the real story? (Or, as I can't believe I’ve seen in recent YDN comments, why won’t she just tell us who she is if she has nothing to hide?).

Here’s the thing that's disturbingly hard to pin down, and it’s a thing I’ve struggled to define myself: what is sexual assault? When does it go from joking/too much to drink/mixed signals to a real, honest-to-God threat? How serious should you be when you follow up after an event like this? Are you going to ruin this person’s life? Are you going to ruin your own by overreacting to a situation that really just wasn’t that bad? Can you trust your friends to support you regardless, or are you going to realize this was really not a big deal in the warm light of day? When is it not okay to just go home and let it go?

I didn’t know, when I was in that position myself. I was a little drunk that night, and it was late. A massive crush of mine had just kissed me, and I was feeling invincible. I came home to my college and ran into a guy I’d always seen around but had never had the chance to talk to in any depth. He was cute and flirty, and I was in a great mood. We talked for a few minutes, and everything he said made me feel fantastic. He’d always seen me around but had never had the courage to come talk to me. “You totally should next time!” I protested, giddy from my night and feeling bold. “I will!” He was shy but excited to talk to me, and I was happy to make a new friend. Tired and satisfied with a wonderful night, I bade him goodnight and told him I was ready for bed. Smiling, he told me “But I’m not done with you yet.” I uncomfortably laughed at his (slightly menacing) joke and told him that in fact I was just too tired to stay out and talk to him. I walked towards my entryway, a little dampened by the inappropriate turn the night had taken, and tried to swipe in. It was only after he’d positioned himself in front of my entryway and repeated his words, with an indescribable look in his eye that I knew. He wasn’t letting me go anywhere.

I wish I could tell you that I was brave. That I kicked him in the balls and made him cry. I wish I could tell you I was angry, and that I threw a clever Buffy-style one liner his way as I took him down. I wish I could tell you that I did something that would make you proud of me. I wish I could tell you that I was anything other than what I was, which was completely, overwhelmingly, life-blurringly terrified. He was bigger and so much stronger than I was, and he was angry that I was leaving him, a fact that only fueled his strength. After he put his hands on me I swear to God I had no idea how I was going to fight him off, but I knew that I had to do the absolute best I could, because he wasn’t letting go. There aren’t too many people around Entryway B around 1 AM on a Saturday night, at least not on my Saturday night. Somehow I ducked under him, swiped in, and ran up my stairs, all too aware that he knew where I lived, and worse yet, had access to my entryway. He yelled “BITCH!” up my entryway as I ran frantically up four flights, to the relative safety of the floor above me, to a suite where a few of my friends lived.

Luckily for me, my friends were home. I tried to relay what had just happened the best I could, but I was shaken to my core. In the midst of my hysterical explanations, the door to the suite was flung open, and somehow I just knew. He didn’t come in, but a friend who had seen the door open gently asked me what my assailant looked like, and I knew it was him. He was looking for me, and it was only a matter of time before he found my suite and my unsuspecting suitemates below. There was a party in my common room that night, so when he came in it didn’t seem that odd. It was only after he’d gone through the bedrooms in search of mine that my friends knew something was wrong. After the cops came to remove him, they told me he’d just stood there, at the corner of the party, waiting for me to come back.

I followed all the proper channels to report him. The police filed a report, I talked to my dean, and I talked to my family. The decision not to press charges was entirely my own. My dean made it very clear to me that the entire situation was in my hands, and that this young man was getting every ounce of punishment I deemed worthy. I asked that he receive counseling, and I let it go. Earlier this year, I told my boyfriend about the whole thing and he said, “What if he hurt someone else because you didn’t do anything more serious?” I guess I’ll never know. I suppose I was hoping he’d had an off night. I suppose when he first touched me I didn’t scream because I didn’t want to wake anyone. I suppose I was hoping he’d followed me to my bedroom to apologize. I suppose I was hoping I’d done the right thing instead of copping out and being a coward. I suppose all I’ll ever be able to do in this situation is just that: suppose.

The point of this story is to point out what isn’t being said. Sometimes you get all the support you could ever desire. Sometimes you’re a little drunk and unsure going into the situation, and you don’t know where the line is. Sometimes you’re afraid to start screaming or throwing punches because you honestly aren’t sure if you’re overreacting. Sometimes you don’t press charges because you don’t want to ruin anyone’s day, or worse, their life. That night was terrifying, overwhelming, emotional, and confusing, and I honestly have no idea what the right answer was. Maybe I found it, and he got the help he needed. Then again, maybe not. Either way, ideas surrounding “sexual misconduct” and the cloudy waters of a sex culture gave me no clear answers, either that night or in the sleepless ones to follow. It is not always rape or no rape, his fault or her exaggeration. Sometimes what’s most hurtful lies in the uncertainty. His behavior that night was unacceptable, and I will never forget how terrified I was in the weeks that followed as I saw him around my college. Honestly, I never really felt totally safe until he graduated, even though he never approached me again. Maybe he’s got a stable job and a girlfriend he loves. Maybe he’s going to have a family one day and be a great dad. Maybe his future actions are going to be something darker, something that's going to make me regret not taking full advantage of the options so plainly offered to me. I have no idea. I hope I did the right thing, but either way I know for sure: I did what I could with what I thought was right, and that’s the most confusing position I hope I never have to defend.

Regardless of what becomes of him, what matters to me is what becomes of us. That we, as strong and intelligent Yale men and women, make sure no woman has to wonder if her terror is an overreaction, or if her feelings of violation are unjustified. Sexual assault is not always rape. Hell, rape is not always rape, as we see it in simple, black and white terms. The violation and the indignity lies in the feeling of fear and helplessness, and that is never something to be afraid to fight. The minute that man blocked my path and made me afraid, I was violated. That is a pure and simple truth that no debate over level of severity or semantics should overshadow. I hope that, should the issue ever come up surrounding someone you know or love, that you do not do as the friends in the recent anonymous YDN articles did and allow your confusion or disbelief keep you from continuing to love and respect them as who they are: someone who was afraid, as no one should ever have to be. At best, talking it out and thinking about the situation in retrospect will yield a helpful solution, and if not, your support just might be the only thing that seems right in the most confusing and frightening situation that person may ever face. That certainly was the case for me, and I couldn't be more grateful.

You'd Think That People Would Have Had Enough Of Silly Love Posts

2012-01-18T22:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve been letting you down. I wish I could tell you I’ve just been busy, or I’ve had so much on my mind that I can’t put it into beautiful, hilarious, touching prose for you as I’ve done in the past. But that would be a lie.

The truth is, dear faithful followers, that I have taken a mistress. Someone who distracts me from the day-in-and-day-out complications of a writer’s thinking, the impossibility that is a normal, simple thought process as opposed to the overthinking that I tend to do (which is often paired with narrations that take place in my head that I work out for later writing). My mistress makes me as happy as we once were, Blogspot. Our relationship has managed to capture that novelty and excitement that you and I once had, and it makes me feel alive again. But here’s the bitter kicker (and I do need you to brace yourself for the irony): my mistress is a mister.

I know what you’re thinking. Not only do I have the audacity to flaunt my infidelity and throw my happiness in your face, but now I’m going to make you sit there and listen to me gush about how I’m so happy without you, not only making you feel undoubtedly inadequate about your own life, but also writing about details that you honestly would be happier not knowing. Fear not. I write not as an ex lover taking joy in your pain, but rather as a dear and rather overwhelmingly attractive friend who may or may not be proposing a threesome of sorts. So listen to me talk and in return I’ll hopefully make you laugh/think/NOT want to throw yourself off the nearest tall building (though according to Cracked, anything higher than thirty stories is generally fatal, so “tall” is really subjective in the grand scheme of body-heaving. But I digress).

For Christmas, my dad got me the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Overly simplified and fabulously generalizing, the book had me decently skeptical from the beginning, but being the avid scholar I am, I figured I’d probably benefit from the help of a textbook or two. Or at least, I’d have something to be really sarcastic about.

The idea of the book is that men and women suck at communicating. This is an evolutionary breakdown that I find incredibly discouraging. How the hell am I supposed to get excited about something like commitment if I know that the sex appeal is going to run out (at least by the time my boobs start to graze my belly button and his ear hairs start to become part of his beard, if not well beforehand), and we don’t even have the guarantee of being great friends who can have great conversations to make up for the lack of attraction?! Terrible plan, Darwin. You really fucked us up. (That’s how evolution works, right? He’s like a creator or something and giraffes with short necks died out because they couldn’t reach tree leaves? Sorry, I went to public school.)

I had never really had this communication problem before my current relationship, probably because I’d never really had a serious relationship before. Yeah, I’d been in love, and yeah it was awesome, but I bailed at the first sign of adversity, which as any adult who doesn’t suck will tell you, is a horrible lesson plan for life. The guys I’d dated before were just really nice and understanding until I broke up with them for any one of a million excuses that really just boiled down to laziness and boredom with the idea of a relationship that takes work. (Well, look at me all self aware and shit. Nice.)

Imagine, if you will, that instead of Mars and Venus, our home planets are strange places called Tennessee and Massachusetts. These places have very different customs, and their citizens are very different people. One Tennessee creature is famous for being overwhelmingly attractive, intelligent, hilarious, and mind-blowingly popular and suave-really the greatest in every way. This creature loves talking about everything, hugging, crying at the end of The Notebook, and over analyzing everything you say and do. The Massachusetts creature, on the other hand, is brilliant, hell-bent on logical solutions to any and all problems, and a massive smartass who often uses his rapier wit to hide his less than manly reactions to adorable things like kitten pictures on the Internet. He talks at length only when something is wrong, often takes words at face value, and firmly believes that “You look nice” is the gold standard of compliments.

These two creatures find each other from their opposite sides of the galaxy and somehow fall in love. It isn’t easy-the Tennessean is stubborn and temperamental, easily offended by the Massachussettsan(ite?)’s seemingly insincere compliments and strange preference of sports to cuddling. The creature from Massachusetts is bewildered by the Tennessean’s wild mood swings and strange preference to cuddling over sports. He’s very proud of his “You look nice” compliments…she looks nice! She’s very annoyed with his lack of poetic compliments…she spent an hour getting ready and she looks NICE??? They do, however, have much more in common than their surface differences may have indicated, and now they’re very happy and in love, blah blah blah…boy, this metaphor died a long time ago, huh?

Being in this relationship is complicated for so many reasons. Tom’s absolutely, balls-out brilliant, finishing his senior year with a B.S. and a Master’s, not to mention an acceptance to Johns Hopkins for an MD/Ph. D program. I, on the other hand, fuck around on the Internet a lot and write smartass blog posts, hoping that someone will read one and offer me millions of dollars to continue being awesome. Tom has always known he wanted a family and a stable, happy relationship. Until recently, my big long term plan involved marrying an heir to a fortune who was also flamboyantly gay, thus creating a beautiful partnership of beard and benefactor. He’s had his future picked out since he was old enough to say “deoxyribonucleic acid” and I’ve wanted to be a poet, teacher, activist, actress, trophy wife, lawyer, vet, snake charmer, and high clearance level secret agent posing as an exotic dancer in Tokyo, and that was all just in the last five minutes. Once, we woke up together and trudged sleepily into his bathroom and I bemoaned my ruffled appearance. He looked at me and said lovingly “Yeah, you’ve definitely looked better.” We have our bumps, to be certain.

But we also have our high points. My three page emotional rants, commonplace after fights, never fall on deaf ears (eyes?). His enthusiasm for sports is slowly seeping into my consciousness, and as a result one of my only gift requests for my birthday this year was a Red Sox hat. When my dog Frodo was hit and killed while I was in Prague this summer, Tom stayed up for hours talking to me, and when he came to visit me over Christmas, we stood by his grave site in my yard and I knew that Tom somehow loved Frodo too, even though he’d never met him. I bring him food when he stays in the lab too long to get dinner, and buy him remote controlled helicopters (then help him install new parts after he breaks them). I work harder to keep up with him, and he says what he’s thinking out loud so that I no longer work on assumptions. We both agree that if we lived in Salem during the Trials, I’d be burned at the stake for being a smartass, stubborn, heathen woman, and he’d be pressed to death right alongside me for being a smartass, stubborn, scientist man, and frankly I think that’s just fucking romantic. We’re so flawed, and we’re so fantastic. And after all my soul searching, all my running around and making terrible short term man-choices, and pushing real opportunity for happiness away in favor of ease, I finally get it. And holy shit it’s just dandy. Good for me.

So, dear Blogspot, again you have my sincerest apologies. I never meant to lead you on and hurt you, and I really hope we can be awkward friends, because I might need to post on you again at some point and it would be really inconvenient for me if you were weird about it. We had some good times, right, kiddo? I’ll call you, and maybe we can get coffee sometime.

Euroblog Part Dva

2011-09-15T08:09:00.001-07:00

I wonder if we can ever really predict how things are going to turn out for us in life. We hope and expect that things will go really well and we'll travel the world and find ourselves learning from other cultures and hopefully contributing something in return, but we can't really know for certain until that moment is upon us. What I've seen and experienced in these last six weeks can't really be summed up in words as much as in feelings and realizations, and while I definitely didn't expect to change my mind or convictions about certain aspects of my culture and myself, I can't say that I didn't end up surprising myself in some ways.

Well, I think that about sums up the typical expected Eurotrip college response for those of you that wanted something meaningful and boring. For the rest of you...

Having successfully made it to Prague without incident, I went about the task of retrieving my suitcase and I braced myself for the nightmare that customs was going to cause. Despite my friendly Atlanta gate agent's warning, my suitcase made it to Prague successfully and with no damages. Buoyed by this victory, I took a deep breath and pushed through the doors to baggage claim to find...a lot of expectant people standing around with flowers and signs for their debarking loved ones.

Wait. Where was customs? Did I totally blow past it? Am I going to be arrested for terrorism? I had this sudden vision of security guards racing up to me, beating me down with their painful sticks, then taking me to a secret government base to run tests on me and make sure I wasn't attempting to discreetly bring typhoid to their country. (Europe's never had typhoid, right?) I was an enemy of the state! Time to panic! I found a security guard and breathlessly explained the situation, trying my best to look as little like a terrorist as humanly possible. She reached under her jacket for her taser and...actually she was just grabbing a piece of gum as she laughingly told me there was no customs for me since I had come from Brussels and Helsinki. Welcome to the EU!

Okay. If we had been in America, I might have been thrown into a room for questioning for forgetting that I had an economy sized bottle of shampoo in my carry-on (which I would NEVER do, because that takes up a lot of room and I have way too many pairs of shoes for that shit). You're telling me I could have exotic American fruits with tarantulas on top, or that I might have come into all kinds of contact with farm animals in the last 48 hours (which they CLEARLY state is a no-no on the customs forms) and I might be bringing some terrible disease to your country that will throw it into a state of ruin, but since I went through Helsinki first it's all gravy? I'm just...that's just...well. All right. Sounds good. I'll be taking my tarantula fruit to my hostel now. (P.S. on my way back I had both come into contact with farm animals AND snuck food back in my suitcase. I like to live on the edge.)

The next order of business was changing money, which was going to be big business because I wasn't even totally sure how to pronounce the currency in this lawless land. I found a nice, friendly exchange window that made a special call to their upstairs unit when they found out I was a naïve little American girl with many travelers' checks to cash. The woman downstairs wiped the drool of anticipation off her chin before sending me upstairs to the special counter where they rob you of your money and your dignity. The girl there was almost apologetic about the amount of robbing they did (a nice, clean 15% commission, and I'd only been in Prague for less than an hour! This is impressive, I think.), and she tried to make up for it by selling me a phone card (which didn't work one fucking time I tried it, in 4 different countries and is now sitting in my wallet, mocking me months later) and looking up the address of my hostel for me so that I could at least take my highway robbing taxi to the right general area. After this exchange, she looked at me and my massive suitcase and said, with a glimmer of hope in her voice, “You're meeting up with a program or something, yes? You're not...spending six weeks here on your own?” She knew I wasn't going to last a week.

My hostel was okay, if not a little ghetto, which makes sense knowing the TA who gave me the recommendation for it after spending 5 weeks with him. I met a jolly Australian man who told me all about his tango with Absinthe the night before, and finally checked in with my mother who had been on the phone with the airline demanding that they remove my name from the sex trade list and return me to the free world at once. I passed out incredibly hard in my hostel dorm and woke up to a friendly Italian girl trying to put on her shoes without disturbing my Rip Van Winkle ass. Time to find my hostel dorm and start the first day of the rest of my five weeks in Prague.

The dorm hostel was okay, but it was definitely in a pretty hood part of Prague, and at least a twenty minute walk from anything fun. Slowly all the Avengers assembled, and we left our dorm's courtyard to our welcome group dinner at a traditional Czech restaurant. Picture, if you will, a jolly place, with two men dressed in traditional Czech garments coming out at odd intervals to play traditional Czech music on their traditional Czech tubas and accordions. All of this is taking place while you're taking shots of traditional Czech drink and eating traditional Czech food, while your traditional Czech professor teaches you how to say “Cheers!” in Czech. Welcome to Prague!

The traditional Czech food was a bit of a difficulty for me, seeing as how seven courses of meats that look like cat food don't really fit into my 16 year vegetarian diet. I mentioned this to the waiter, who gave me the choice between an asparagus dish and traditional Czech fried cheese. Having not seen a real vegetable in over 48 hours at this point, I opted for the asparagus like a good little girl. The waiter responded by telling me he would bring me the cheese. Lovely. It turned out to be pretty good, like a block of mozzarella stick, and I knew at that moment that I was doomed to die of scurvy before my trip ended. The traditional Czech drink is called Becherovka, and it tastes like anise liquor. We took a shot with our professor, then another member of the group and I agreed we needed more. We ordered another shot, at which point a friend of our professor's came up to us and informed us that since Americans had no idea how to hold their liquor, if we had another shot we would probably die.

Clearly this man had never met us. We took the second shot with all the grace of American angels, and went out as a group with our new TA.

How to describe this TA? I'll try to scratch the surface. This boy was coming into the club as most of us were leaving (around 1 AM), and I decided to stay another hour or two since I wasn't really too tired yet. Another hour or two turned into four hours, with me sitting extremely bored as the TA and two other guys on our trip played a drinking game with some toothless Englishmen. At one point one of the guys kissed me out of nowhere, and when I let him know that probably wasn't the most welcome of advances, he stormed off. My concerned TA came over to make sure everything was okay with his new students, and decided this was a great time to run his hand over my ass as horribly cheesy Czech 80's hair band music pumped through the club speakers. He eventually abandoned us to find our own way home as the sun was rising (we found out later that cops had showed up and busted a drug deal in front of him so he ran for his life, which really only makes sense if he's secretly Tony Montana), and I fell into bed for three hours of sleep before my first class. This was an excellent start. Did I mention he was wearing a battered Patagonia fleece during this entire club experience? This man was a bastion of class, ladies and gentlemen.

My flamboyant Czech professor was literally a woman of many hats. Every day saw a new fashion statement in the form of a huge, colorful hat and usually a colorful scarf to go with it. She has a tendency to show a lot of enthusiasm in the form of words like “VOWWWWW” and “VYBORNE!” which means “excellent” in Czech. She breezed through a decent amount of Czech our first day, and I knew instantly that I was going to have a lot of trouble with this language. Having grown tired already of putting their best feet forward, the men in our class quickly began devolving back into a form of caveman that I have honestly never seen in such magnitude in my entire life. Every exclamation of enthusiasm from our lovely eccentric professor was cause for a chuckle and muttered smartass comment from the cave clan, and their contribution to the class mostly consisted of talking so loudly during the lecture that no one knew what assignments we were supposed to turn in the next day until I asked them to please shut the fuck up long enough to hear what was going on, a move that made me super popular for the weeks to come. Despite their regressed states of humanity, these boys got away with pretty much everything over the weeks to come (Like the time we were headed to Austria and a couple of the guys pissed their beds and left their vomit everywhere in the hotel room, and all our professor wanted was a couple hundred crowns to pay for the damages. One of the guys actually had the audacity to say that since he'd pissed on one of the walls, and not IN a bed, he didn't have to pay anything. Also in Budapest one of the other guys got blackout and The Exorcist style projectile vomited all over some angry Hungarians then fought them so we got kicked out of the club.Yale must be so proud.).

Over the following weeks, we did a ton of traveling to various Eastern European areas, including a film festival where I met the most beautiful man the world has ever seen. I'm picturing God himself coming down from the heavens and sculpting this boy by hand. A Brazilian mother and a Venezuelan father had created this angelic creature, and he came towards me on the dance floor, opened his mouth, and spoke to me in...English. American English. Boring, San Diegoan American English. All the air in my hot man balloon went out with gusto. How did we manage to find the only Americans in this entire club without even trying? Where are all the foreign men, people? Whatever, he was nice. We also saw some films at this film festival.

Vienna is beautiful, I had the best Chinese food of my life there. Also we found an English speaking theater and saw the last Harry Potter movie, during which four of us bawled like tiny infants at least three times. Cesky Krumlov, the town of the gypsies, showed us NOT EVEN ONE GYPSY. I wanted to beg one not to shrink me and try to collect a bottle of their tears but they totally sucked and didn't even bother to show up to dinner. Irresponsible. I also managed to live an entire lifespan of a relationship, from time together to a tearful breakup and goodbye, in the span of four days, which I'm pretty sure is something only I could manage to do (don't worry, I came to my senses and am now firmly shackled in the bounds of holy collegedatingmony).

Living in Prague itself involved eating a lot of pasta, exploring in our INCREDIBLY limited free time, constantly promising to ourselves that we would, in fact, visit the Sex Machines Museum before we left (I never did, sadly), and going out to really horrifyingly sketchy nightclubs where old men circled the dance floor while leering at us. But hey, the beer was really cheap.

Our last week in Prague was an eventful one. Our professor, being the crazy lady she is, thought nothing of scheduling a wine tasting the night before our final exam. Luckily for me wine is generally not a problem and I awoke no worse for the wear, but I did have to rouse at least one friend from their blacked out slumber on my way to taking the final (which was somehow simultaneously incredibly hard and a huge joke). We had a nice little awards ceremony the last night, during which we screened the films we'd made and our professor singled some of us out and gave us pretty pieces of paper for actually paying attention in class. I got the Outstanding Contribution to Literature Award, which roughly translates to the Massive Nerd Who Wants You To Stop Fucking Talking While We Talk About Kundera Award. The last day involved a boat ride and a complete blackout of one of my friends from the trip by 4 PM, which required a cab ride home. We got back to the hostel and wrestled her out of the cab, profusely apologizing to the cabbie, after which he turned to us and gently asked, “Becherovka?” Yes. Becherovka indeed.

We said our generally not at all tearful goodbyes to our classmates the next day and I headed to Paris with two others from the class, where many a good time was had, including singing Knockin' On Heaven's Door with a bum minstrel on the metro and inspiring the entire car to do the same, befriending an entirely unsmiling crepe stand man whose magical food inspires songs and poetry across all of France I'm sure, and also seeing a lot of Parisian things that make me pretty sure I need to get skinny and be a trophy wife already so I can spend all my time there.

Even though I'm back in the States, Europe isn't totally over yet. I ran into Professor KvK a couple of times over the last two weeks, and she's still insane. She tried to pimp me out to a Yale Law student I met in Prague and had a nice conversation with, and when I told her I had a boyfriend and could no longer partake in such shenanigans, she enthusiastically replied, “That's fine...you can have TWO boyfriends!” Apparently one of my classmates bought a case of Becherovka and some kind of party is in order. The Cro Mags are back in full party mode and have overtaken what I'm sure would be an otherwise lovely seminar taught by our beloved KvK on Milos Forman. I'll never forget what I learned there, by which I mean I'll forget pretty much all of the Czech and most of the films but it was still meaningful and I grew and whatnot. Which reminds me, I should really write that required ISA report so my scholarship for the summer doesn't get revoked. They probably wouldn't want to read this, would they?

EuroBlog Part 1

2011-07-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

Atlanta, Chicago, Brussels, Helsinki, Prague. Nonstop. A little over 24 hours of travel time, total. All with the goal of eventually getting me to Prague in time for my Kafka class to start. Where am I now? Currently I'm cruising at some bullshit measurement statistic. (I mean, do you know how high airplanes tend to fly? You do? Fuck off, no one likes a know it all.) Anyway. I'm on this plane to Brussels and I want to jot down all the crazy shit that's been popping into my head since this journey began this morning. My morning started at a quarter of seven after a fitful night of restless sleep filled with anxiety dreams about the wake up call to our hotel room mysteriously failing and single handedly ruining my entire day's travel plans. Mom and I were in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, and in the tradition of a young girl's first European trip on her own, a fight shortly followed our wakeup call. The topic? Quick, if you're a girl and the clothes you wear are too tight to feasibly put anything bigger than something really small into your pockets, how do you carry around all your shit in a foreign country? A purse? According to parents, every person currently on the ground in a foreign country is well trained in a multitude of skills including jujitsu, CIA level profiling, and professional thievery (I mean, all universities over there offer thievery as a major so it's only natural that everyone there will have taken a class or two in pilfering). So no purses, because in Pilfering 101 all Europeans learned to carry a switchblade on them at all times to maximize purse strap slicing efficiency.

So what, then? A backpack? No, silly American girl! Europeans (Let's just call a spade a spade, okay? Thieves.) always travel in packs of at least three burly men or at least German lesbians so they can pin your arms back from behind and grab your backpack to run.

Okay, how about fanny packs? Were you planning on getting any over the next six weeks? Or at least earning some semblance of respect from people around you? Yes? Fuck fanny packs. They're like visual chastity belts.

The solution my parents came up with is this money belt thing that fits under your clothes. Like a ninja fanny pack so people don't throw rotten vegetables at you. Perfect! Right? Let's go over the inventory of a typical ninja fanny pack, shall we? Passport. Credit cards/ATM cards. Traveler's checks. Katana sword. (In case you run into any Bulgarians. I hear they're vicious.) Suddenly your ninja fanny pack looks a lot like a normal fanny pack, except it's under your clothes, so you look extra fat and also somewhat lumpy and block shaped. Winning plan!

I finally promised Mom I'd wear the lumpy ninja pack so she'd stop yelling at me, and we decided to unwind by getting into Atlanta traffic. After letting our first expletives of the day loose, we congratulated ourselves on making it so far in the day with clean language. (We'd probably been up a little over an hour at this point. Victory.) We made it to the airport and Mom dropped me off so I could get checked in. The cheery Puerto Rican man who handled all my shit kindly wished me luck on getting my 49.5 pound suitcase through all FOUR of my connecting flights. Great. I met up with Mom and we got a nice bagel and some drugs for me to take on the plane (something I should probably do soon). I hugged her goodbye and gave her shit for looking like she was about to cry. “Don't cry. Don't do it...” Then I turned away and walked towards security, finding myself repeating those very demands to myself.

I should probably explain. Though I want to spend my life traveling the world, and all of my classmates have already done seven bazillion global trips on their own in their time, I really am pretty sheltered. This is hard to imagine, I'm sure, but bear with me. I grew up in a tiny town, and even though I've clocked more backcountry time in my short life than pretty much anyone else I know my age, I've spent very little time in big cities, even with my family. Having such a close, small family means that those people travel with you everywhere. I've only been on two trips in my life with other people's families. I've been on one road trip without at least one member of my family present, and we didn't even leave the South. I've been to Mexico, France, England, Scotland, Belize, the Caribbean, etc. with my family, but it's a totally different experience on your own. Or so I'm learning. I seriously need to not miss my next two flights.

Anyway, I got through security (FINALLY GOT A HOT TSA AGENT, HELL YEAH), and made it to my gate. When I got there, I started reading Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being for class, and instantly got sucked in. I have to say, it's got to be one of the best books I've ever read. Maybe I hit it at the right time in my life, but I found myself nodding obnoxiously at different parts, and completely connecting with Sabina's character. For those of you who haven't read it, Sabina starts out seeming like the villain mistress of Tomas. She's a crazy whimsical artist who writes him passionate letters about wanting to have sex with him in public. But as we get to know her, we find a depth to her character and her struggles with herself that I totally get, namely her serious problem with commitment to men who truly love her and her difficulty reconciling both her admiration and instant boredom when one of her lovers (who is ready to leave his wife to be with her) tells her that he's gentle with her because love means giving up your strength. I completely get that. On one hand, we all want to be loved and treated as well as any person could hope, but on the other there's this need for adventure and a little bit of wildness that love like that can't really touch. Not that love isn't fun and everything, it just fulfills a different need. And some of us just don't have that need (at least not yet). I've been in love, or at least the kind of love that being 17 allows, and it makes you into something different. You're a part of someone, not two people who are together alongside each other's lives. I've looked into someone's eyes and literally heard the rest of the crowded room around me go quiet as the edges around the other person blurred like a vignette from a cheesy movie, yet within months I threw that relationship away on flimsy, long term excuses and lusty feelings for the single most toxic hookup relationship I have ever experienced. I don't blame Sabina for steering clear of that kind of intensity, at least as someone young and strong and full of promise. 'Cause I'm full of lots of things, and I'm pretty sure promise is one of them.

I got to Chi City and had a four hour layover. I made a beeline for the Field Museum Store and talked myself out of buying a King Tut excavation kit and a giant wooly mammoth stuffed animal (both targeted towards people about 10-15 years my junior). I made my way to the food court and migrated from the Burrito Beach line to the deep dish pizza place line, then finally decided on a place with an Irish sounding name where I proceeded to buy the least healthy meal ever and get disgusted with it about a quarter of the way through and throw it all away. I then realized that my iTunes download for four movie rentals the night before had failed miserably, so I sucked it up and bought 24 hours of Internet to try again. Of course, this led to the unavoidable issue of my laptop battery wearing out, so I literally walked around about half of the international terminal AND the entire food court before finding a place to plug my laptop in. Of course, it was taken by a determined looking business woman (this fucker in front of me just reclined his seat so his head is practically in my lap I swear to God I might punch him) so I had to sit a few tables away and keep watch until she left. I did this for almost an hour until she finally got up, so I headed over and politely asked if she was leaving. She remarked that my timing was excellent. I decided not to tell her I'd been watching her like a crazy stalker for an hour. I only got all of Sucker Punch downloaded before I had to go to my gate, and I boarded my flight to Brussels, excited and naïve. We sat on the tarmac for almost two hours before they informed us that they'd closed down our entire section due to weather so every flight bound for Europe was temporarily fucked, and they were going to reroute us and hopefully have enough gas to get there. Seriously that's what they told us. So I called Mom, rather frustrated because I know I'll have to go through customs in Brussels before I can catch my flight to Helsinki and if I miss that flight I'll DEFINITELY miss my flight to Prague because it's super tight...

We finally got up in the air, to immediately experience the worst turbulence I've ever been in. I managed not to Linda Blair all over my fellow passengers (who looked TOTALLY unfazed, by the way), and get food for the first time since noon (it's like 8 by then). They offered me this cheesy pasta that looks and tastes exactly like vomit, and some dry crackers. I ate like a member of the Mongol hordes, famished from a day of tiresome raping and pillaging, and thirty seconds later my food was gone. I looked around and saw that most of the plane had just gotten their food open. Classy, T.

I took some drugs and had almost four hours of really interrupted sleep. During which I froze my balls off. Did I mention the Nigerian guy next to me was carrying a giant gold purse? Like, that was his entire carry on. A big gold ladies' purse. The American guy next to me noticed I was shivering and offered me his blanket, but I put my big girl panties on and just dealt with the cold. We started to descend, and I got excited. Everything is more awesome when it's exotic. There's turbulence, but it's okay because it's Belgian turbulence! We landed and I entered the airport, talking to myself. “You're in Brussels! By yourself!” People started staring so I shut up and tried to find my gate. So apparently they only tell you what gate you're leaving from 45 minutes before departure. Which means that even though my plane is boarding in ten minutes, I have no idea where the gate is. It's like they force you to be more laid back and it's stressing me out, Goddammit. I used my free time to try to find a phone card to call my mother and wake her up at 4 AM, and I used French to do it. The guy either humored me or thought I wasn't American, either of which was very kind, and spoke French back. Unfortunately what he said was unhelpful, so I got the most horrific exchange rate possible to use a pay phone to call home. (5% commission. I was desperate.)

I had to go through security again. European security is the best, I've decided. They tell you which shoes you should take off, and if you don't do it they just wait until you beep and make you take them off. They have this fun little animated video that plays on a loop, where a guy is going through security and does stuff wrong. The TSA agent (or whatever the European equivalent is) is this MASSIVE hulking black guy, and he makes huge gestures when the guy does something wrong. He pats his pockets in exaggerated motions and the passenger empties his out, dumping a shitton of wrappers and other stuff into the bin. SO REALISTIC. Then a woman comes along, sees the huge security guard, and (smiling) starts stripping. Well, she just takes off her jacket but still. She's also dressed like a prostitute. Best video ever. By the way, I took that stupid ninja thing out of my shirt because I was sick of it, and just put it on the outside of my clothes so I could get my shit out. The woman at security tried not to laugh as she reminded me to take it off to go through the line. FML.

Also, I can already see the trend where European men dress like gay hipsters and it makes me sad. I don't need to see your balls through your neon jeans. Really.

I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and got ready to leave. I then realized that I didn't know how to leave. All the doors looked exactly the same, and there wasn't one set apart from the stalls or anything. So I walked around, trying different doors, looking like a complete and total moron (people actually were staring), and finally saw a woman come in so I lunged for her door before I forgot again. USA! USA!

On my flight to Finland: I flipped through the magazine and saw an article on Finnish summer sports. They include: mud soccer, which moves so slowly that the goalie just hangs out and drinks beer, a wife carrying competition (with a best costume component), and an air guitar contest. I officially love Finland.

Now I'm in Prague at my hostel and I'm starving to death. Tomorrow I move into my dorms. I'm currently talking to a nice Aussie about Absynthe. Praha!

That Awkward Time Between Christmas and New Year

2011-01-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

After leaving Las Vegas, we began the drive to Middle of Nowhere, Utah. My two cousins and aunt and uncle all live in LA, and we all decided to meet up this year to make merry in a remote cabin near Zion National Park. Despite my mother's promise that the drive from Las Vegas to Zion was only about two hours, we ended up taking four to complete the trip, with exactly two stops in between. Before heading out, however, we had determined that we needed to make a shopping trip for the week, because we were driving up on Christmas Day (when NOTHING is open, be it run by Christians or dirty heathens), and grocery stores around Zion are few and far between. Due to Utah's Prohibition-esque liquor laws (nothing over 3.2% alcohol content can be sold anywhere except in state or Native American run liquor stores. That's wine coolers and light beers, folks), we decided we needed to stock up on alcohol as well.

Now, far be it from me to say that my family is full of lushes, but we certainly like our wine (and beer/champagne/martinis/cognac/rum/white russians, etc.), so it was imperative for a five day cabin stay that we have a selection of drunk makings for the evenings. Because Nevada is awesome, the local Sam's Club had a beautiful selection of wines and liquor, and we decided that seven bottles of wine, three bottles of champagne, a handle of Svedka, and a bottle of Hennessey was more than enough for five days. And by we I mean my parents and grandmother, because I go to college and know very well that that much alcohol between seven decently sized drinkers won't last three nights unless they're Methodists. This is why I always drink with Methodists. More for me.

We bought a ton of food at Sam's but still needed non-bulk items so we braved the horrific corporate hell that is Wal-Mart for things like butter and bread. Being fed up at this point, I offered to be the sentinel and guard the alcohol while my family went in for yet another shopping trip. Our little rental car was absolutely brand new, and it had an alarm system that we weren't used to, so after my father locked the doors and left and I opened the door to help my grandmother find us again (she got sick of Wal-Mart too), the alarm system started freaking out. An interesting note about alarm systems: absolutely no one gives a shit. At all. Unless you're black or wearing a hoodie (neither of which applied to me at the time), when people see your alarm going off they come over to either laugh at you or try to help, both of which happened to be in abundance as the alarm went crazy. After like ten minutes, my parents finally came back out and hit the Shut Up Button on the remote. We managed to somehow fit all of that alcohol, four people's worth of luggage for over a week, AND groceries for five days into a cute little Ford Escape (God, we really abused that car over the coming days), and set off into the desert. Rather soon outside of Vegas we came upon a roadside correctional facility with a billboard that said, "Caution. Potential Escaped Prisoners." Queue creepy urban legend.

After a rather uneventful trip, we came upon the entrance to beautiful Zion. Now, I wouldn't cross my grandmother in a very large array of situations (most of them involving public service charges or late food at a restaurant), but that car ride through Zion absolutely owned her. Between screams of "Oh my God we're going to die!" from my grandmother and "Oh my God it's SOOO GORGEOUS!" from my mother (equally obnoxious when repeated ad nauseam), I made it through to the other side of the park with most of my hair still firmly in my scalp. A feat, I think, that deserves some sort of reward.

We made it to our beautiful cabin on a mountain, exhausted after a long drive and ready to relax. Now, it's important to remember that while my family is great at a lot of things, figuring out new technology is not one of them. This job usually falls to me because I'm the college student (if I'd have known that "You're supposed to be smart, you go to Yale" was going to be the bane of my existence every time the Internet stopped working, I might have reconsidered. Or pretended to go deaf. Something logical like that.). When we got to the house, we followed the instructions about getting into the garage with the code provided (fancy!), and I figured the next logical step was to open the one and only door in the garage to get into the house. This was a horrible mistake. An alarm immediately began piercing the pristine mountain calm, and shutting the door again did nothing to sate its thirst for audible destruction. The worst part, however, was that the stupid fucking door led to...the outside again. Not into the cabin at all. WHY would you build two doors from the exact same place to lead into the exact same place? And how the hell were we going to get into the house? We also weren't even entirely sure that this was the right place, so we might have been setting off the alarm in some poor person's house for no reason. Oh, and aren't cops supposed to show up when house alarms go off?

After a lot of mad scrambling and pressure on me to figure out what the hell was going on, we magically figured everything out and finally settled into a nice quiet evening filled with wine and Mormon jokes. The next day we made it into Zion for a hike to the most incredible waterfall I've ever seen in person. The water crashing was so loud it sounded like thunder, and the freezing spray made the Yale/Harvard football game of 2008 seem like a trip to the fucking Bahamas. It was excellent. We made it back to our cabin without incident to wait for the rest of my family. So we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, we decided that since we had neither cell phone service nor internet, we would do as we were advised by the owner of the cabin and steal Wi-Fi from the Thunderbird Motel parking lot in the bustling, five building town of Mt. Carmel. I say "we" but I really mean my parents, since I reasoned that (A) No matter how little faith you old people may have in my generation, even iPhone users aren't on Facebook ALL the time, so a wall post is a long shot, and (B) If they'd been lost this whole time, they were bound to show up as soon as my parents left for the internet pirating.

Guess who was right? Yep. They showed up about twenty minutes after my parents left, along with their two tiny dogs . The next day we set out to explore the bustling metropolis of Nowhere, Utah. Bearing in mind that no police officers had come to arrest us during the alarm system debacle, and none of us had actually seen a police station among the five buildings of Mount Carmel, our curiosities were piqued when we noticed a police cruiser parked on the side of the road-a seeming speed trap. However, the piquing continued when, hours later, we noticed that it was still there, unmoved, with the officer sitting in the exact same position. Then we realized the horrifying truth.

The police officer was a fucking mannequin.

Have you ever seen House of Wax? Either the old one or the one where Paris Hilton gets a spike rammed through her head? Because that's definitely worth seeing, just so you know. The premise is that people have car trouble, so they walk to this town for help. Everything seems fine except there's no one on the streets. They peek into a church and see that everyone's in there, at a service, so they go into this wax museum to pass the time until everyone gets out and they can ask for help. This is, of course, incredibly unrealistic, I mean what town has an absolute 100% churchgoing record? I live in the Bible Belt and that shit just doesn't happen, no matter how many fanatics you know. Anyway. They realize that the wax statues look incredibly convincing, and they get creeped out because wax museums are creepy, and blah blah blah they finally realize that everyone in the town is actually made of wax and there's a crazy guy who waxed them all and he wants to kill and wax the newcomers and Chad Michael Murray is a horrible actor but God he's attractive.

So now we knew that we were actually living in the House of Wax town, a fact that was only made worse by our accidental visit to a taxidermy museum (there were reindeer to pet outside and we had to go through the museum to get to them. It was so horrifying.). So we were in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone service, grocery stores, or police around. Queue the insane snowstorm. We got like two feet in one day and one night, which led to rather competitive snow fort building and delicious hot chocolate. But as they say, it's all fun and games until you have to get your grandmother back to the airport so you freak out and try to drive cars that aren't meant to go in snow and end up causing hundreds of dollars in damages to a Prius and relying on the friendly but outwardly terrifying locals to get you back to your cabin after making an emergency grocery store/snow chains run. They do say that, right?

In between all this drama, I also managed to injure my foot during the pressingly important process of running up stairs to get towels to clean up a wine spilling, causing pretty intense pain and ruining my chances of getting to experience one of the things I'd been looking forward to the most: Vegas for New Year's. My parents managed to have a good time though, and my dad got wasted and won $175 by playing with a Blackjack strategy that didn't actually exist because he read the strategy guide wrong. This is awesome.

Being in Vegas requires the ability to move around, so we decided that renting a wheelchair for me was the best option. I spent an entire day living the life of a paraplegic, and I have to say, it's fascinating. I like my legs a lot, and I obviously think that it would be horrible long term, but for a day I got to cut huge lines, have tons of free champagne because the bartenders were too afraid to card me, and watch people try really hard to figure out what happened to me, their shocked silence speaking volumes when my mother steered me around in circles, laughing maniacally, and my father shoved me into a corner backwards on the most crowded elevator I have ever been on, also laughing maniacally. Classy. The day ended with my watching Jersey Shore for the first time and weeping openly for my generation. Weirdest New Year's Day ever.

We stayed in town a bit longer, and between seeing the naked Cirque Du Soleil, winning $40 illegally at a slot machine, and thinking I was locked out of our room for a full 20 minutes, sitting outside forlornly while a drunk Italian guy shouted into a cell phone next to me in the hall, only to find out that I was on the entirely wrong floor, I started to miss home. I have a borderline unhealthy dependence on constant animal fuzziness, and the desert was beginning to make me look like a native Floridian after years of sun abuse. We made it back in one piece, I went to see Tron (in which the main character looks strikingly like a mashup of two of my more serious exes), and I came back to Yale ready to do a lot of work and be all studious and whatnot. All in all, I'd say my holidays were pretty boring. How were yours?

T.

Christmas X (Holiday Blog Part 1)

2011-01-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

Most college kids get a month or so off for the holidays. This is generally about three weeks longer than they'd like to spend with their families, so side trips with friends are common. For me, however, my three weeks of holiday break almost always breaks down like this: 1 week for debilitating illness, two weeks for an exceptionally exhausting whirlwind family vacation, 5 hours for packing/jet lag recovery/preparation for travel. This is absolutely draining (but fun and memorable, blah blah blah). This year's break was no exception-I got sick just as I put my luggage down in my bedroom (literally, my throat caught fire right after I got home, it was like magic. Really, really horrible magic). The next week or so was pretty tame, involving lots of How I Met Your Mother reruns, an attempt to get my parents to love Dr. Who at least a fraction of the amount that I do, Narnia in 3-D (FUCK 3-D, but I love Edmund. Can't help it. Peter is obviously the hot one and he's a bit older, but he's sort of boring and honorable and whatnot. Edmund is fun and sarcastic. Story of my dating preferences.), having Christmas early (I got a remote controlled airplane AND an Iron Man action figure that shoots out little plastic missiles! I have the present preferences of a five year old boy.), a failed attempt at seeing my first lunar eclipse that involved going to a cemetery at 3 AM alone and seeing only cloud cover, and garlic tea, which is the single most disgusting tea of all time.

We got underway around the 21st or so, heading to Atlanta for a night to stay with my grandmother before we all flew out to Vegas for Christmas. When my family goes to Vegas, we're generally partial to the Luxor, and this trip was no exception. Christmas Eve was spent with dinner at the Venetian, with an excessively garlicky spaghetti on my end, and a fabulously gay waiter named Gabriel. The busboy responsible for refilling our water took his job dead seriously, so I asked him if they beat him if our water glasses stood only half full for more than a few seconds and he responded that, in fact, they do. I don't really like going to expensive, pretentious restaurants and acting like the rich, pretentious clients who frequent the restaurant because (A) I'm not rich or pretentious, and (B) Everyone working at the restaurant makes fun of those people. We promised our new friend Gabriel that we'd come back and visit him on our return for New Year's (yeah we definitely didn't do that), and left the restaurant so I could meet up with one of my best friends from Yale who was visiting his grandmother for Christmas.

My time with Matthew is about 70% laughter, 20% scathing sarcasm, and 10% being violently offended. He's great. He's an unstoppable attention whore in groups of 5 or more, so most people don't get to see his tamer, nicer side, but I usually spend my time with him and his roommates so we get along great. Despite his over the top antics and propensity for discussing hentai (which I'm often guilty of as well), he has a wonderful girlfriend who most of us like more than we like him. His brother is a 16 year old delinquent with impressive intellect and comedic timing who I was convinced was a sociopath when he visited Yale my freshman year. He probably isn't. My Christmas Eve in Vegas was spent wandering around the strip with both of them, and somehow we attracted more crazies in two hours than I had seen in my previous time in Vegas (not counting Kotton Kandy, the worst drag queen I have ever seen).

The three of us left the Venetian and hadn't been off the walkway three seconds before a wide-eyed young woman positioned herself right in front of me and announced to me, "I'm pregnant." Okay. I go to school in New Haven, we've got our fair share of ghetto. Before the Have I lived in Atlanta until I was 8, and my old neighborhood ended up becoming a bastion of sin and crack dens basically right after we left for the hills of Tennessee. I'm used to crazy homeless people, but this woman was different. Most of the ones who assault you try to tell you a sad story to solicit money (which is very effective for poor saps like my mother), but this girl didn't ask for money one time. After I responded to her random announcement concerning the "No Vacancy" sign on her uterus by telling her I was sorry (hey, no one wants to be pregnant if they're homeless), she started following us and telling us more about her imminent progeny. "His name is Mimi. He's an animal." Oookay. First of all, Mimi is a girly-ass name. The only recognizable Mimis of our generation are this one, from the Drew Carey show (enough said, really), and this one, from Rent (who was a heroin-addicted stripper). Mimi is a horrible name for a girl, if our pop culture references have anything to say about it, but for a guy it's just appalling. Second of all, what the hell did she mean by "He's an animal?" Was she going all The Omen and saying that her fetus was in fact a jackal and the coming Antichrist? Was she trying to scare me into following her as some sort of prophet or alien hybrid or human and animal? Did she honestly think her baby was an animal, or did she mean animal as in party animal because it kicked a lot and made her drink booze for two? OR was she referring to it as an animal in the proper scientific sense, as in, all humans are animals?

Okay no one really cares. This girl was just absolutely nuts.

She kept following us until finally Matthew put an arm around my shoulders and told the crazy lady that we had to be on our way, then we ran across several lanes of traffic to escape from her, politely holding in our hysterical laughter until after we had disappeared into the crowd. We then found joy in taking the prostitution pamphlets from the scores of men forcing them on innocent passersby (yeah I had to look up the plural form for that one and it still looks stupid but whatever), and loudly assessing each offer. One girl was only $45 an hour, so we determined that she must give excruciatingly painful oral sex, etc. We passed a homeless man who had a sign that read "All I want for Christmas is a hooker," which has to be given points for honestly. At another point, a man came up to us to ask us what our plans were for the night because he was lonely and wanted to hang out. The strange thing about this encounter (other than the fact that it happened in general) was that he didn't seem to be hitting on any of us and he didn't seem to be on crystal meth. He legitimately seemed like a big loser who had no one to hang out with, so he thought the proper protocol was to approach random people and solicit their company. We ran away from him as politely as we could.

As the night wound down and we waited on a street corner to get picked up (like prostitutes, but Matthew's mother and grandmother were the Johns), a creepy voice from behind me said, "You look like you could use a hat." I whirled around to find a horrifying sight: a CLOWN in a wheelchair handing out balloon hats. I'm not afraid of too many things. I am, however, absolutely terrified of clowns. They're NEVER FUNNY and they're the only children's character to be repeatedly used as the stuff of horror movies. I understand that this particular evil being was in a wheelchair and therefore supposedly less intimidating, but honestly that's exactly the sort of trickery employed by these dastardly creatures to keep you unaware. I refrained from openly weeping and waited for Matthew to assure me that the doer of evil had vacated my vicinity, shocked that we had escaped unscathed. Merry Christmas, the clowns won't get you THIS time.

Happy Holidays. Because saying "Merry Christmas" is for insensitive douchebags.

2010-12-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

So whether my fellow college students want to hear it or not, I'm done with exams and heading home for the holidays on Day 2 of Exam Week. This is awesome because I get to go home and do generally festive things, but it does have some drawbacks. One of the more serious ones is of course everyone's general lack of holiday cheer in the traveling world. At first I thought it was because I was saying "Merry Christmas" to someone who actually gives winter sacrifices to Norse gods or something, but even after switching to the oh-so-PC "Happy Holidays," I'm still getting sour faces and general lack of cockle-warming cheer. Mmm I love the word cockle.

Side note-let's start using words that sound hilarious in general context/serious settings. Like my new favorite word: invaginate. This word is so infrequently used that autocorrect just got all up in my business about it, which is sort of ridiculous because the word "autocorrect" also isn't recognized by autocorrect. Existential crisis? Anyway. Invaginate. It means "to sheath" or "encase." Which if you think about it is sort of obvious. You know why. ANYWAY, I want to start using it in completely serious contexts, like in class, "Everyone in Arthur's life knew that while the sword was invaginated in the stone, he would have to get off his ass and earn being king in a non-lazy way." Or used in those fucking obnoxious Kay Jewlers commercials: "This holiday season, don't show her you love her by taking her anywhere fun, or actually doing things to ease her stress like picking up your shit off the bedroom floor like she asked. Instead, buy her one of these horrifically expensive diamond trinkets that only have value because we tell you they do. Plus they're super sparkly, and humans love sparkles. We'll even invaginate it for you in one of our special cheap shitty boxes covered in velvet, which no one even thinks is cool anymore. This holiday season, give the gift of throwing money at your relationship in the hopes that she'll start sleeping with you again. Every kiss begins with Kay."

Moving on. I dragged my ass out of bed this morning at the crack of 9 AM to spend valuable hours of my life sitting uncomfortably next to strangers as my lymph nodes burn with the dryness and despair of being much higher in the air than nature ever intended while a squalling infant takes at least three months off of my life and the stewardess nearly crops of a valuable toe with the drink cart (which you have to fucking pay for anyway). I wish we could go back to the days of old when flying was an adventure. No, not like an Amelia Earhart adventure, we all know how that turned out. More like a dressing-up, glamorous, you-don't-have-to-pay-extra-if-you-want-to-breathe kind of adventure. In a time when people were far less frequently morbidly obese, so they didn't spill under AND over the armrest in a puddle of lard while their unlucky seatmate flattened herself against the window and prayed for an upgrade. Nowadays everyone is grumpy and wearing Uggs, two things which are criminal, particularly around the holidays (being grumpy, not wearing Uggs because that's criminal always).

So I got on the CT Limo (which is a joke because (A) They are FAR from limo-material and (B) They're run by the mafia), and tuned out to the sounds of Little People (which you should listen to if you like music/being chill). When I got to the airport, I quickly scanned the outside check-in people to see if they seemed more likely to give me a free pass if my suitcase was a couple pounds over. They did not. I sidled up to the counter and put on my best adorable-face and asked if I could throw my suitcase on the scale just to see if I needed to take anything out. Aaannnndddd-49 pounds, bitches. I am great. The men behind the counter are less excited, probably because they suck. I get inside the airport and wait in line to have my driver's license scrutinized. I pass the time by checking out the younger male TSA agents (sometimes you get lucky), and glancing over at the little sign that lets the more curious holiday traveler know exactly what the TSA agents see when your body goes through the brand new scanner thing. I am expecting this knowledge to be comforting, because there seems to be no reason to (A) Look at everyone's genitals and (B) Tell everyone you're looking at their genitals if there is in fact reason to do so. Keep that shit to yourself and keep the line moving.

My assumptions as to the nature of the sign were in fact horribly misguided. On the sign was a nice little picture of the male front and back, followed by the female front and back. For the 832590432890th time in my life, I praised the heavens for the nature of my birth and my general girliness because fellas, they can totally see your junk. And if this picture was a legit indication, they can see it in rather excruciating detail. SO if you've got any qualms about complete strangers who hate their jobs and get their kicks out of judging you on the size of your manhood (can't imagine why you'd have those qualms but whatever), don't fly. Or pack your briefs with convincing sock puppets or something. Seriously.

After laughing hysterically at this sign then realizing people were staring, I move through into the security checkpoint, where I proceed to remove anything that might conceal a weapon/preserve my dignity. I look down ecstatically at my fucking awesome sparkly blue socks and hope everyone in the airport is as excited about them as I am. They're not. Douchebags. After walking through the (sorry to interrupt but a man wearing a FEDORA just sat down next to me and asked to share the outlet with me. I said yes because he is wearing a fedora.) security checkpoint, a friendly woman comes up to me and tells me she needs to feel me up because I might be a terrorist. She has based this on the fact that I am wearing a North Face fleece, and studies show that blonde girls with North Face fleeces are generally actually Osama Bin Laden. When I get older I've GOT to get the name of his plastic surgeon.

This pat-down is actually not so bad because the lady prefaces it by saying "It'll be like a nice massage before you get on your flight." This is quite possibly the best thing any TSA agent has ever said to me, and it has inspired me to come up with a new slogan: "TSA. We do foreplay right." I'm sure it'll catch on soon.

Side Note: Can we talk about automatic faucets for a second? Yeah? Okay. Fuck them. I counted how many seconds the faucet ran water in the airport bathroom. I went, "One Mississippi." Then guess what? The water shut off. WHO HAS SMALL ENOUGH HANDS TO ONLY NEED ONE MISSISSIPPI TO WASH THEM? Fuck you, automatic faucets.

After my massage I sit down to put my pants back on (that was part of routine procedure, right?) and I look up to see an elderly man putting his belt back on. This combined with my recent brush with second base made me giggle, and I make a wise crack about how the fine boys in sky blue had stolen his dignity. He responds by giving me an in depth history about every encounter he'd ever had with TSA agents that had led to his feeling violated in some way (so, all of them, then). I make a polite excuse about having to get on an airplane or something and start heading towards my gate (AFTER I wished him a Happy Holidays, of course). I then run across the greatest display of adorable I will probably see all day. TRIPLETS. IN A TRIPLET STROLLER. I quickly recover from my mini-stroke from cuteness overload and say a quick prayer to the Norse gods that these bundles of baby joy and their capacity to rupture eardrums will NOT be on my flight. Reality is so much less romantic, isn't it?

I then make it to my gate and seek out an outlet to charge my laptop so I can write a blog about my travel adventures so far, and I have quite a difficult time locating one. I have to cross the hall to a different gate and sit against the wall, then I realize that Triplet Mom is at this gate. This gives me the chance to breathe a sigh of relief because she will not be on my flight while simultaneously watching her trifecta of adorable from a safe distance. It is after a few moments of this creepy child watching that I realize: this woman is really obnoxious. You know how when you travel with something cute like a puppy or a child or something and everyone instantly thinks that they're your best friend and therefore entitled to put their hands all over your cute companion? And it's obnoxious? So people are doing that, but instead of being annoyed or at least humbled by all the attention, this hoe is lapping it up. She starts singing nursery rhymes to her children at deafening levels, then doing some sort of terrifying baby dance. People realize that she's really obnoxious and stop paying attention, so she starts feeding her infants McDonald's to try to regain public favor. It is at this point that my holiday cheer finally starts to wane, along with my ever shrinking faith in humanity. Watching this mother goad her children into performing tricks of adorableness by singing then feeding them like baby seals has put me right back in the...WAIT. Just saw a baby boy wearing BABY UGGS. This is the ONLY time that Uggs are acceptable. I just melted like the pansy ass snowfall outside from last night.

Fine. Happy Holidays to all. I'm going to watch Narnia on the plane and drool over Prince Caspian. Another post will be coming soon.

P.S. Just saw a really old man wearing RED PANTS COVERED IN SANTAS and a Christmas tree tie. I gave him the biggest smile ever. Faith restored.

2010-12-05T21:04:00.000-08:00

Now for some vintage posting, which was originally on the Saybrook Blog in 2008. This is my contribution instead of writing a meaningless Anthro final paper. More will follow later this week.

On The Homefront: My Tofurkey Day

November 28, 2009 by Tara Tyrrell

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s right after my birthday, it’s naturally cheerful in a way that makes Christmas seem tacky and forced in comparison, and it’s always always always delicious. I’ve never been the kind of girl to pick daintily at a salad, or count carbs instead of grabbing life by the balls and eating that entire pizza. So naturally, Thanksgiving is a great day for me. You spend the whole day cooking, starving, salivating, cleaning dishes so you can reuse them to make yet another pile of delicious food, and finally sit down to a meal the size of a small third world country around 5:00. By 5:15, your barbaric gorging begins to slow, and by 5:21 you are absolutely useless. You take a two hour break to recharge, and by 7:42 you are on that pie like white on rice. Best holiday ever.

We do pre-Thanksgiving dinner snacks right.

Thanksgiving isn’t just about food, however. It’s also a time for your family to come over. And eat all your food. My Thanksgivings are usually pretty small. I’m an only child, and most of my family lives across the country. This year my dad’s parents and my uncle would be joining us for the food orgy. My grandparents got married when they were 19, and divorced about 5 years ago. They absolutely hated each other when they were together, but now they’re contemplating getting back together. It freaks us out. A lot. My uncle lives about an hour away, and is going through a difficult divorce. My dad and uncle are not necessarily best buddies. My grandfather brought his German Shepherd. She doesn’t play too well with others. I have a German Shepherd. She had never met a dog bigger than herself before. Cue perfect storm.

My grandfather is basically wonderful, and he’s so proud of me for going to Yale that he literally wears his Yale hat everywhere he goes. That hat was the first thing I saw as my grandparents got out of the car after their long drive. After a grandfatherly bear hug, I braced myself for the 43902 pound German Shepherd attack. I made it out fairly unscathed. My grandmother was next, giving me an air kiss and handing me two Macy’s garment bags filled with birthday dresses. “I didn’t know which one you’d like, so I bought you two. If you hate them both, I’ll take them back and we’ll go shopping tomorrow.” Sweet. After standing in my driveway for about twenty minutes, my grandparents looked down, saw my bare feet, and ushered me inside (it was like 70 degrees out, but apparently “catching your death” was a concern when my grandparents were young). We went inside, and kicked off German Shepherd Parade 2009.

Two shepherds and a man in a Yale hat. Oh, and my mom.

We all breathed sighs of relief upon seeing amicable Shepherd interactions, and all agreed it was time for wine. My grandmother insisted I “do a fashion show” of the dresses she’d bought. Dress Number One was great, if a little conservative. I walked out, and my grandmother nearly choked on her wine. “It’s a little short…don’t you think? And tight?” Good Lord. My mother was behind her, giving me enthusiastic gestures of approval. To humor dear old Grandma, I tried on Dress Number Two, which was covered in weird fringe, and unanimous approval was voiced for Dress One. Time for more wine.

At this point, I informed my grandparents that I would be interviewing them for my US Gay and Lesbian History paper. I needed to know about their first contacts with homosexual men or women when they were young adults, and the impacts (or lack thereof) that they’d had on their lives. My grandfather’s smile froze, and he changed the subject. My grandmother drained her wineglass. Time for hors d’oeuvres? Yes.

My grandma. Wine. Food. Yes.

My uncle arrived, just in time for the first food of the day. He had to bring his own share of turkey, since no one else in my family would be partaking in non tofu based meat dishes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept of a Tofurkey, allow me to enlighten you. A Tofurkey is a tofu based ball of awesome. You baste the outside just like a normal turkey, and the inside is pre-stuffed with a pilaf of goodness. It also comes with a tofu jerky wishbone, dumplings, and gravy. This is what a Tofurkey looks like before it is basted and cooked to fantastic deliciousness:

Two specimens of Tofurkey, next to their less attractive cousin, the vegetarian pot roast.

Mmm. What else was on the menu? The world’s best garlic mashed potatoes, French cut green beans, homemade mushroom pate, this great cauliflower casserole thing that my mom makes, corn, salad, cranberry sauce, and five different kinds of pies. We still have a lot of food in the fridge.

My cousins and aunt and uncle live in California, and wanted to have a family Skype session before dinner. After attempting to teach my mother how to use Skype for about 20 minutes, I finally took over and set the damn thing up myself. We chatted for a few minutes, learning about my cousin’s failed Tofurkey-from-scratch experiment, meeting their new dog, and making bad puns (my uncle is famous for those). It was the best kind of family visit-we got to see them and talk to them, and we didn’t have to cook extra. Win.

To pass the time before the food was ready, we decided to watch a movie. I wanted Narnia, but was overruled with a Robin Williams stand-up comedy DVD. Fine. Unfortunately, this was one of the raunchiest, over-the-top comedy routines I had ever seen, and it lacked in funny. It lacked a lot. My grandma and uncle loved it, my grandfather pretended to be asleep to avoid embarrassment, and my parents and I squirmed uncomfortably. Mom finally announced that dinner was ready, and we scrambled to turn off the Robin Williams Shit Show. Ah, food.

We have a very small dining room table.

After putting on the John Lennon Collection, as is Thanksgiving tradition since I was little and thought the song “Cold Turkey” was about Thanksgiving, we all sat down to eat. Mom forced us to all say we were thankful for stuff, an act for which absolutely no one but the speaker ceased their Olympic food consumption. As we started to slow down and free our mouths for other functions, like speaking, my grandmother turned to me and asked me if I knew about “that Twilight thing…Full Moon or whatever.” I informed her that indeed I had heard of Twilight, and we began talking about Stephanie Meyer’s Mormonism. This lead to a general discussion of the Mormon faith, which my dad believes “has a lot of benefits.” What kinds of benefits, we wanted to know. My grandfather chimed in, “Sexual benefits.” “No the husband doesn’t get to have sex with all the wives at once,” I protested. Uncomfortable silence. “I was thinking more along the lines of sleeping with a different woman every night, but I bet orgies happen too,” my father replied. “Yeah ’cause like, who’s gonna stop them? The Orgy Police?” My last statement sent the conversation plummeting into Inappropriateville, and after a while the talk turned to the movie 300. I told my family all about the Saybrook cheer I had come up with, “Saybrugians, what is your profession?” “Strip! Strip! Strip!” “This is madness! This! Is! Saybrook!” (We’re gonna make this big, folks. Our grandchildren will be chanting this stuff.)

After dinner, we all made our way to the comfy living room furnishings, bordering on food-induced comas. We then proceeded to watch the James Bond marathon on TV, stopping only at 9 to see if The Office was on. It wasn’t. Fail. The sun set, pie was consumed, and we all slowly fell asleep. I can’t say my Thanksgiving was as interesting as I’d expected. My grandparents decided to remain friends, my dad and uncle got along great, as did the German Shepherds. Nobody got drunk and sang karaoke, none of the food burned, and we all got to hear about John Lennon’s heroin withdrawal in “Cold Turkey.” ‘Twas a Thanksgiving so normal (for my family, anyway), that I’m almost disappointed. Oh well. There’s always Christmas…

Class Notes, Part 4

2010-10-27T08:17:00.001-07:00

Today's class is given by one of our TA's-not the male one unfortunately because that would be entertaining. Things are laid out in bullet points on the slides (no pictures WTF?) and she's taking like giant pauses between phrases. It feels like a high school presentation by that one girl who everyone ignores but she daydreams about this presentation and the whole class' sudden realization that she's a genius. The high school soccer captain (WAY better than the football team let's be honest) asks her out after class, she gets voted prom queen, after graduation she crowd surfs offstage...but actually people are just bored. It's the sort of dream that I might have had except I was pretty aware of the fact that being smart wasn't going to get me anywhere within those four walls so I made up for it by being funny and trying to keep my head down when anyone mentioned Battlestar Galactica (mmm Lee Adama).

Immigrants are coming over. The TA tactfully says “not everyone was pleased with these new immigrants.” Well yeah. Is anyone really pleased with new immigrants? Really. Even if you don't look that different, if you're an immigrant you're going to get shafted. Italians. The Irish. Chinese people (Why isn't it just Irishians and Chineseians? Why do you get two words? You think you're better than everyone else, don't you? Fucking immigrants.) And now...Mexicans and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. So apparently prostitution was a problem-there were laws checking into female immigrants' prostitution-ness. They also didn't want anyone coming over who would take up resources without giving anything back (namely women and video game addicts). Our TA asserts that this was unfair. Honestly I get it, it's not that women are useless, they just weren't allowed to hold down a whole lot of jobs in the late 19^th century. Give them some damn work and they'll give back. Jesus.

New York's Lower East Side was Immigrant Central. She shows us a picture of lots of people in a street. I'm pretty sure something was actually going on because people are hanging out of windows and shit, don't use this to illustrate how many people were flocking to the Lower East Side, this is clearly not a typical day. Oh hey a typewriter! And a weird ethereal looking picture of a line of fairies getting ready to talk to a skinny Santa at a little table with a typewriter. Go figure. Oh okay this Santa guy is Charles Latham Sholes, and these women are lining up to thank him for creating the typewriter so they could spend their days fetching coffee and writing shit for men while trying to keep their asses from being constantly grabbed by John in accounting. Thanks a lot Charles, you dick. You could have made the typewriter more male friendly, like every time you push that bar back across it shoots out a beer. Women would have been CEO's in no time.

Women also worked in garment factories. It sucked. This girl is trying so hard to sound like a professor but it just isn't working. She's just reading from her script but she keeps trailing off and looking down, then getting a second wind and starting back up, then trailing off again with those long damn pauses. It's okay you don't have to be a professor! You're not a traitor to your feminist ideals! Own a cigar shop and no one will ever question you again, I promise.

I'd like to digress for a moment. What the fuck is up with guys who don't pay on the first couple of dates? I have now had several experiences with guys up here (not even Northern guys, one was from Texas, another from Chicago) who look super shocked when the check comes and I reach for the bill to be polite, they allow me to take it, then I punch them repeatedly in the face. Really guys? I talked to a friend from DC who explained that you don't want to invest in someone until after you've been dating awhile so you split the bill until things get serious. This is bullshit. At least if he takes you out, sleep with you, then dumps you there were a free couple of meals in the deal. This way he doesn't invest a damn thing. I feel like it's even more motivation for him to stay with you if he's paid for some shit. “Hey man, you should quit seeing that chick she's crazy.” “Yeah but I put in a good few hundred bucks by now, I'm invested.” No but seriously. Guys, pay for your date. Jesus. You can bet she's judging your cheap ass and the chances for a second date are probably going to decrease. You asked her out, you pay. The end.

So there were the Knights of Labor. I think they're like the Knights of the Round Table or the Knights of “Ni” except they gave birth or something I wasn't paying attention I was too busy ranting about cheap ass men.

Boardinghouses for female laborers. Must have been a man's wet dream, a bunch of young women living together, probably having pillow fights in their scandalous head-to-toe underthings. They were called “women adrift.” Who the fuck called them that? No really I've never heard of that, it sounds stupid. When are you even going to use this term? “Hey there's a woman I might talk to.” “Nah man she's one of those women adrift, she might be a pain in the ass.” “You are a pretentious douche.”

Young men and women mixed freely at places like roller rinks WITHOUT PARENTAL SUPERVISION. Oh you done fucked up now, parents. There might be hand holding and other inappropriate stuff going on at these roller rinks of debauchery and you know what that means-if he falls down, she's going down with him. It's just not smart and it could lead to bruising. Jesus, parents, use your heads.

Woah she's now talking about how women couldn't always afford these rinks so if they saved up and went they demanded some sexy time in return and this was rebellious. Go women! It's about damn time after all that bullshit in Revolutionary America about how women hated sex so it should be a short and boring as possible-of course she hates it now, you lazy asshole. So now you had women putting on their roller skates and going on the prowl. Well, as much of a prowl as one can really accomplish with ankle length dresses and big silly hats.

This TA keeps referencing readings we have due for this week and it's obnoxious. You're a grad student, you procrastinate just like we do. That reading will get done right before section and not a moment earlier. You're just turning us against you, I'd advise against it.

Boarding homes offered by middle class reformers offered places to stay where a matron would make sure that NO ONE GOT LAID EVER. Doesn't that sound great? And we're even going to start a working girl's club! We can all get together and do the things we have to do at work like sew and write, but this time it'll be for fun! And we'll teach you how to live your life too by giving you tips! But you can't gossip, flirt with men, chew gum, or read romance novels. No, really those were the rules. Sign me the fuck up! I want to be an ignorant loser old maid with bad breath and not even erotic literature to offer me “comfort” so that when I sucker a poor guy into marrying me at age 40 I really don't know what I'm doing and I run screaming from the sight of his penis because I don't know what it is and it looks scary and I move in with the boardinghouse matron forever and ever!

Well apparently everybody else felt the same way so these clubs and boardinghouses failed except for with women who were born in North Dakota.

Hull House was a famous house founded by Jane Addams. She never got married and never had kids because she was educated so no one wanted her. 19^th century men were douchebags. See you next week!

Class Notes, Part 3

2010-10-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

I am seriously considering skipping class today. There are many factors to this possibility: I am not feeling well, I'm fucking exhausted, it's cold and rainy outside, and the Yale Daily News' joke issue is today. I drag my ass out of bed and convince myself that I have to go to my 10:30 class because I need to ask my TA if I can miss section later this month to go home for the weekend. So I get up, get breakfast, and make it to class like ten minutes early (this only happens on days I don't want to go to class, somehow-days when I'm wide awake always involve me being late to class). My TA isn't here. What the fuck. Well fine I'm here already and there are only like ten people in this class so I can't leave. Let's talk about Women and the New Republic. Not Banana Republic, not OneRepublic, but the New Republic. I initially misspelled banana. Damn. Okay so there's a woman feeding wine to a bald eagle in this picture. It's like college, but patriotic! I just sneezed. No one said a damn thing. Rude. My professor looks nice today, she's wearing a gray tweed skirt and a scoop neck black top. MUCH better than her radioactive shirt (I initially wrote “shit” unintentionally, and that would have worked as well). Okay pay attention, T.

Women have to play a role in the family. Well, duh. Honestly give me about a week to do research and some time with Google Images and I could teach this fucking class. Apparently one of the nice things about the New Republic is that men let women learn about politics. How kind. Also we skipped talking about the Revolutionary War for some reason, which sucks because it's the last war before 1900 in which the sides were pretty clear cut and you can root for a clear winner. (I think the Civil War has some messy parts, it wasn't just about slavery, okay?)

New Jersey writes up a law referring to voters as “he/she” and guaranteed the right to vote to every single woman, black or white, as long as she was a citizen. In the 1800's. All the single ladies! (All the single ladies...) So this one asshole lost an election and said it was because of this law, so he started a campaign to take back the night! Or the vote. Whatever. So he reasons that single women are more likely to vote for their own personal interests as opposed to the interests of others. Right, because men are thinking about everyone else when they vote. And so, my friends, New Jersey became the state it is today, with the clever nickname, “The Asshole of America.” Married women weren't allowed to vote because the men who decided this were under the illusion that they had any control whatsoever over what their wives did or thought, and they believed that they would just tell their wives how to vote and make redundant votes.

Abigail Adams was a fucking boss. I don't know why she and Washington didn't get together and have the most epic sex of all time, and produce an heir to the throne of the universe. Unfortunately her husband didn't take her seriously and told everyone she was a lesbian because he was afraid of her. Okay, we don't actually have any proof of that but that's what guys do so I'm sure he did it. This guy named Tapping Reeve (I'm not even kidding, his name is Tapping Reeve) makes sure that women can't be employed on their own because men are entitled by law to have women be their slaves. A husband might be deprived of the company of his wife if she got a job. Trust me, Tapping. Everyone would win in this situation. Women got their space and men got to have sex with their mistresses in the middle of the day in their houses in peace. He also said that women should have a dove-like temper, and that masculine airs were frightening. Jesus, Tapping, think about this shit for a second. You don't want women to be independent or outspoken, you'd rather they flap around, cooing and shitting everywhere? That's what you want in a woman? I mean, to each his own, but don't force it on anyone else...

Now a picture of a woman with her two children. She has black hair and they have blonde hair. They're little boys, and in the frilliest dresses possible. There's so much wrong with this picture, the least of which is not how high this woman's hairline is (you could land a fucking airplane on this lady's forehead, forrealzzzz). Also these little boys have mullets. SO WRONG.

Checked Facebook for a second, apparently there's this new thing where you can make your profile picture pink-toned for breast cancer awareness. Here's the thing: we've all heard of breast cancer. I'm all for selling Save the Ta-tas shirts, or having fundraisers. But turning shit pink just to “raise awareness” is a waste of time, and people won't look at your Facebook because it looks like your camera puked Pepto-Bismol all over your indie profile picture. We've heard of breast cancer, so unless your effort actually raises money it's kind of useless. Get off your ass and donate some money, you lazy douchebag.

Okay back to women. A girl raises her hand and asks a question, she's obviously a guest and not someone actually in this class, because she's really pretty and well groomed. Not that all feminists are unattractive or unwashed (yours truly is a shining example), but this class is filled to the brim with cliches. They are a motley crew. I spend my time in section watching them and fantasizing about how much I could do for them with just a couple of hours and some product...

All right now here's something I've noticed: every time someone asks a question in this class, which is usually just me, the professor answers it, then makes you feel like a dick by saying “that was going to be my next point, actually” or “yeah I'm actually getting to that later in this class” and then goes on to make you feel worse by constantly pointing out that you had already mentioned something that she had not yet gotten to for the rest of the class. My pinkie is cramping. That wasn't related, it just is. Also I've gotten so bad at typing since last semester. I suck at spelling now, too. I don't know why this happened, I used to be so good at both. Am I already getting old and going senile? Fuck. I'm not even legally old enough to drink.

Now we have a picture of some slaves hoeing a field while their overseer smokes a pipe and stands on a stump looking smug. Apparently we're supposed to not know that slave women didn't have freedom. Well Professor, you teach me so much. Honestly this class would be better fit for high schoolers, it's really kind of insulting to our intelligence at times. Just looked at the clock for the first time, this method of taking notes makes things go so much faster, I love it. Black women could be mothers, but not Republican mothers. Still true today.

Oh saw more of the professor's skirt, not as cute as I thought...

These desks are so uncomfortable. Really, Yale. You've got billions of dollars in endowment and you can't make the desks in WLH even remotely comfortable? What the fuck. I'm yawning but trying desperately to do it surreptitiously. I have the Bed Intruder song stuck in my head. You know, the one where they autotuned that news story where that hood-ass guy rants about the rapist in the projects who tried to rape his sister. I am afraid to show this to my parents because they will think I'm a bad person for finding this amusing and having it on my iPod, but it's just so damn catchy. Autocorrect tried to correct “autotune” and I almost went back and put a space between the words but you know what, Autocorrect? Fuck you. Your ass needs to keep up with my generation.

There was a flurry of slave-freeing. People started cracking down on slave-freeing. Oh GOD she's wearing cowboy boots with her ugly skirt. And TIGHTS. This is not okay. Focus, T. Slaves. Slavesslavesslaves. They were slaves. And poor. I already know this. Some groups wanted to help them. I know this too. Elizabeth Freeman apparently looked like a man. Or this portrait painter was absolutely devoid of any talent. Seriously I could have painted this when I was five. I think about that a lot with modern art and abstract art-I could fucking do this. I could vomit onto a canvas and call it an abstract commentary on the social sphere and sell it for a couple thousand dollars. Well, if college doesn't work out...

Jesus why doesn't Apple make another color option for the MacBook? Really. I wanted to buy a Pro just so I didn't have to put up with constantly trying to keep the inside of my laptop clean looking. No matter what you do, it always looks disgusting. Ridiculous. Oh hey, time to go. Nice. See you Wednesday.

Class Notes, Part 2

2010-09-29T08:20:00.001-07:00

Missed class on Monday because apparently I have yet to master the advanced technology of the alarm clock. Apparently we're talking about the 18^th century now. I always get confused with the use of centuries instead of just saying what year it was...the 18^th century is the 1700's, just fucking say “the 1700's” why do we need to make shit more complicated?

So the Daughters of Liberty and Daughters of Britain. Professor was talking about how women weren't involved in politics, and if you asked a woman back in the day what she thought about politics apparently she'd say, “But what have I to do with politics?” which just goes to show that women back in the day really were uneducated, who starts a sentence with a conjunction?

Britain was considered to be a big girly country, clingy and whiny while big bad America was all manly, ripping up the New World and urinating all over to claim its dominance. Some writers begin to see the principles of liberty as feminine, however: a hardworking housewife dedicated to simple pleasures like spinning wheels instead of tea tables (though let's be honest, a tea table has a lot more uses than a spinning wheel, and it was the spinning wheel that got Sleeping Beauty in trouble).

Now there's a political cartoon from the 1700's where Britain calls America a rebellious slut. I had no idea that the word “slut” was around in the 1700's. This class is teaching me all kinds of stuff. Also apparently the mushroom in the picture is important. (It's not just a mushroom, ladies, it's a Liberty Cap.) Yeah there are no men in this class except for one of our TA's, who apparently was Lamar Alexander's web guru in Tennessee...which is odd. The one man in the room being a die-hard Republican makes about as much sense as my professor's current shirt. It's all shiny and color-changing. Is it blue? Indigo? Radioactive?

Taxes start pissing people off, and women start taking advantage of the fact that everyone is foaming at the mouth to surreptitiously begin writing political shit. Sneaky little bitches. I like it. Boycotting and petition signing started to become a woman's thing as well. For those women who felt uncomfortable picketing, there was Protesting: The Poetry Edition, where women would write passive aggressive poetry about how no one could strap them down and force tea between their lips (I'm so glad my professor caught the sexual undertones to this). Apparently the Governor of New Jersey invited a bunch of people over for a tea party, and there was a nine year old girl there. She was offered a cup of tea, which she took. Then she curtsied and threw the tea out the window. And that, ladies and gents, is how Snooki's great-great-great grandmother made her mark in the world.

We now see a propaganda poster depicting these activist women. Shit is going down in this poster, y'all. There's a lesbian, a drunk woman passing out, a...wait for it...black woman being treated as an equal, a dog pissing on a baby, and a brawl going on behind the meeting. Also I'm pretty sure you can see one woman's ankle. Clearly these women are OUT OF CONTROL. Quick, somebody get a scold's bridle. Or a shotgun. (As I type this, I start to wonder if there are any of the mythical Yale lesbians in my class. I've always heard about them, but the only girls I've seen making out at Yale have been my friends, so I'm skeptical. I'mma be keeping my eyes open now.)

Tar and feathering IS NOT A JOKE, OKAY? It sounds funny, but it's not. Okay?

A woman has a baby and wants to name it after a British guy. Angry women invade her house and want to tar and feather this woman AND HER BABY. They're not exactly keeping it classy, are they? Apparently some people agree that these women are a bit terrifying so they legally shun her, leading poor Hester Prynne to live out her days alone with her daughter. No, wait. That's something else.

Grace Galloway had a husband named Joseph. He abandoned her and took their daughter. Then he was declared a traitor and the government seized his property. What a douche. His now homeless wife wanted nothing but make sure her daughter was safe and happy so she took all the money she had and sent it to keep her daughter safe. Then she fell in love with an ex-con named Jean Valjean, who was imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. There is some singing, she tells us about how she dreamed a dream, then dies.

Wait.

That might be Les Miserables.

Oh, hey, there's a war for Independence! If you've seen The Patriot, you don't really need to pay attention in class here, right? Women have to go all Rosie the Riveter and keep baby America from sleeping on her stomach and suffocating to death. Inflation starts happening but soldiers were paid absolute shit so these women were poor as hell. Women are freaking out and starving and stuff (whine, whine, whine), writing their husbands and asking them to quit fucking around and playing with swords and guns, and come home and take care of their damn families. Jesus. As time wore on, women started to get uppity notions that the farms and households they were now running partially belonged to them. What would Glenn Beck have to say about this? Armies were pillaging and stealing food, setting shit on fire, and just generally doing things that if there weren't a war on, people would assume that they were thug-ass miscreants. Even though they really were, you know, thug-ass miscreants. But we remember them as heroes, isn't that how it works?

Soldiers would come in and stay in your house and give you smallpox. And then they'd never call you.

Right after I made that joke my professor started talking about mass rapes and how commanders didn't stop them. So now I feel bad.

Also, stray cannonballs would probably kill you.

Some women had the option of being camp followers, which are basically like army groupies. Apparently there were 20,000 army groupies in the Revolutionary War. Oh, oh I know this one! This is where the term “hooker” comes from, I think. 'Cause there was a guy named hooker and he had some groupies and they called them Hooker's Girls, then eventually just hookers. (Just asked, it was the Civil War. And my professor just admitted that a lot of the army groupies were sex workers. Way to leave out the fun stuff, Professor Tannenbaum.)

Molly Pitcher became a symbol of females in combat. Women would bring water onto the battlefield to cool off the cannonballs (there's a joke here, I just can't quite find it). They were likely to get shot. BUT they did get military pensions after the war by Washington, which just backs up the vast evidence that Washington was a fucking boss.

Female servants would eavesdrop on British men and write all their conversations down, then smuggle them to Washington in the linings of their petticoats. It is said that Washington would then tear open the petticoats with his teeth and swallow them, learning the secrets by an osmosis of awesome.

Black people can die for Britain too! Not for America, though. And apparently a lot of British officers went back on their word and didn't free slave soldiers, they just resold them. This might be the douchiest thing of all time. And a lot of the ones who did get freed went to Sierra Leone, and we all know how things are over there, so basically this was just a shitty option. “You can fight and maybe die here! And when you're done, you can go to Africa and all your descendants can fight and die over shiny rocks! Beats working in the fields, right?”

Basically the moral of this story is that men are violent assholes.

From The School Front...

2010-09-29T07:42:00.001-07:00

So I've decided that the only way for me to keep up with the blog and survive the scholastic firestorm that is this semester is to combine them...so I bring you the Class Notes Series. Don't worry, these aren't your average class notes. I'm taking a class about women in America before the 20th century, and it's a little bit boring so I decided to take notes the fun way. So here they are, Part One, for your enjoyment (Part Two will be posted by the end of the day).

Witches:

Giles Cory-pressed to death. Use of torture and accusation of a man-odd.

It was actually difficult to get a conviction of witchcraft and most sentences were not death.

Most accused witches were middle aged. Typically married. Had few or no children. Middle age considered to be the prime of a person's life. Finished with childbearing, basking in acquired status of a powerful wife/mother. Danger was misuse of such power (ambition, pride). Large families were considered to be a sign of a happy marriage. Witches were accused of attacking children or interfering with another woman's family. Often the accusers themselves fit this profile. Accused witches were often “quarrelsome.” Being a “scold” sentenced you to wear a scold's bridle (like a hat thing with a leash, some had a metal piece inside the mouth to keep a woman from talking). Gossip could also get a hoe in trouble.

If a daughter married, she only got portable items, no land. Arguments for the accused: they had smaller families, maybe worse marriages, perhaps being sassy was their only defense mechanism...

Rachel Clinton (Haffield): Rachel's father died only four years after they moved to Massachusetts from England. The three eldest daughters in the family were the children of his first wife. Rachel's mother was a bitch. Recorded in the town records as being “crazy-brained.” Before she went batshit, she made sure all her dead husband's money went to her own daughters, not the step-daughters (like a reverse Cinderella (unless you're the step-daughters)). Crazy Mom died, Rachel finally got married to Lawrence Clinton who was 16 years younger (get it, Cougar Lady!). He was an indentured servant but she married him and paid of his debts then...oh hey he left. Shocker. Then the abused step-daughters started suing Rachel (this girl had it ROUGH). So she's 58 years old, broke as hell, and people decide to pool their resources and give her a house and some money out of kindness. Wait...no they don't. They accuse her ass of witchcraft. Makes much more sense. So she turned them all into a newt. (They got better...)

So to find out if a woman was a witch, all these men would get in a room and strip some poor woman down to look at her boobs. They were “looking for witch teats.” (Uh yeah okay. And guys just go to strip clubs for the buffet.” No really. There's a picture up right now of like twenty men in a room just ogling this poor girl. She looks pissed.

So Salem witch trials...girls are bratty and accuse anyone who pisses them off of being a witch. Incidentally, all these women's husbands are pissed that they married a woman who makes them do some work in bed (for once) so these ladies are toast. (Except for the homeless woman, Salem was just sick of hearing her beg for loose change or offer to wash their cars for a dollar.) Nineteen people were hanged. Maybe this is further evidence that marijuana should be legalized. “You're a witch...nah that's cool. I have a cousin who likes his “special time” with the livestock, we've all got our vices. It's like we're all...connected in our vices. Woah. What sayest thou?”

Apparently all the witches were also liberals. Surprise! This is starting to sound like the Tea Party...except their criteria is a little more...externally obvious. I wish Monty Python were around to roast them. “Burn him! He's a Muslim.” “He looks more Latino, honestly.” “He looks illegal to me!” “No look. He's holding his green card.” “He's an illegal AND a forger. Burn him! He's taking our jobs/eating our babies.”

Maybe one day we'll have a whole class about how insane people were in the early 2000's.

Teacher just asked who knew The Crucible. She was talking about the play. I was talking about the movie with Demi Moore we watched junior year of high school. Get it, public school!

Apparently the crazy spoiled bitches “took their show on the road” (no really she just said that) and went from town to town to accuse EVEN MORE people. Since everyone thought they were possessed, they could say pretty much anything and get away with it. It was like a Puritanical version of “having fun.” Makes sense. They're living out the Old Testament, people gotta die in mass quantities. It's how the Bible rolls.

Thank God for small favors. They'd have slapped a scarlet letter on me while tying my noose and slinging holy water at me before I turned 20.

Eventually Salem climaxed, and settled into a warm, fuzzy, cuddling session. And then historians proverbially didn't call the next day then bragged to all their buddies about how they nailed the crazy town. Public apologies were issued. Then the previously accused witches rose from the dead and everyone sang Kumbaya. Kidding! They were still dead.

We All Know What "Vegetation Management" Means

2010-05-28T14:11:00.001-07:00

Your second summer of college (especially if you go to a school of overachievers) generally carries with it an implication of travel. Some go to foreign countries to take classes at exotic universities. Some go to big cities for internships. Still others go to places of need to spend their summers doing humanitarian work.

I went about twenty minutes away from my house for the summer.

In all fairness, I do live in a pretty amazing place. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to a huge amount of diversity, with lots of species found nowhere else on Earth, more rainfall than anywhere else in the country outside of Mt. Olympus in Washington, blah blah blah I'm the child of a trail guide and can't turn it off. So for my internship I decided to spend the summer living in Park housing at Sugarlands, the area of the Park closest to my hometown. (Not that I wouldn't have gone elsewhere in the Park, it just happens to be where I ended up.) When I say close to my hometown, I mean literally two miles outside of the Gatlinburg city limits, which if you've ever been to Gatlinburg are only maybe four miles away from the city limits at the other end. I'm a Volunteer Intern Ranger Stupid Question Answerer. That's the official title. We get a uniform and everything.

Monday morning of training week, I got up earlier than God himself, stumbled around while trying to still maintain a decent image for my shiny brand new housemate, Emily, and somehow managed to find my way to the dungeon training area in the basement of the Sugarlands Visitor Center. I didn't really have too much time to form any preconceived notions of this job, but I sure as hell didn't expect what I got. The starting gun went off and a motely crew made up mostly of awkward and oddly shaped people shuffled into the room and took their seats, and I surveyed each of them as they sat. (First impressions aside, they're all okay, with some exceptions being absolutely awesome). Seasonal rangers, interns, and volunteers alike all have to go through the same training, so a lot of the people I met that day would be my partners in crime (or upholding government standards, whatever) for the whole summer. We played the mandatory icebreaker game, and learned not to say “shit” in front of visitors. So far so good.

The rest of the day consisted of presentation after presentation, with varying levels of crippling boredom. Being a local, often the things being said were common sense to me, and I had to constantly remind myself of the others in the room from less awesome states like Texas who had never been to the Smokies before. One presenter stood out, basing her presentation on an acronym (government people fucking LOVE acronyms (almost as much as I fucking love parentheses)). Her acronym started off with S-R-E, and a quick sweep around the room confirmed that everyone was working just as hard as I was to figure out the remaining letters. Like Wheel of Fortune only without winning, Vanna White, or, you know, a Wheel of Fortune. Enthusiastic Lady finished off her SRE with a W, and all hell broke loose (quietly). Upon discussion with others later, I found out that she was the kind of woman who would never even consider the implications of the acronym SREW, but just to make it painfully clear, another ranger stood up afterwards and suggested that Communications be added to Stewardship, Research, Education, and Wombats (or something like that), but she just nodded, confused, and we went about our day.

The remaining days went by without much incident, mostly filled with confirmation that the people I was working with excel at being obscenely awesome, interspersed with falling asleep during PowerPoint presentations, hanging out with a man who looks just like Santa (who also introduces himself as Santa), and making inside jokes about elk bugle sounds. Win.

The winner of all presentations (which if you've paid attention at all to the above paragraphs you'll realize is not necessarily the most difficult title to achieve) was definitely our cultural stereotypes lecture. Basically people who come to the area have horrible ideas of the toothless, shoeless, pregnant, uneducated, religious zealot moonshining hillbilly. While not all of those traits are wrapped up in one person (generally), they do have some basis in fact. Southern Appalachians have a long history of being dirt poor workers of the land, with no dental and often limited contraceptive options. I personally was taught abstinence only sex education, which included completely fabricated statistics about birth control causing cancer in 80% of users, condoms being basically useless, and one abortion completely destroying your reproductive system (not to mention your chances at getting into Heaven).

Anyway. Back to the greatest presentation of all time. We started out listening to a jaunty little tune about incest, followed by a low budget documentary about a local moonshiner named Jim Tom. The material was so awesome that I took my first (and so far only) notes for the entire week so that I would have pristine quotes for later enjoyment. The movie starts out focused on an old man driving a car that completely redefined my idea of the word “ghetto” who spells out M-O-O-N-S-H-I-N-E in Morse Code on his car horn. Already I could tell that this was going to be the greatest thing of all time. Within the first three minutes of the film, while Jim Tom is driving around his hometown, he pulls out his personal breathalyzer and gives it a good blow. After making sure that he is still within the legal limit (we assume, though he is honestly such a ridiculous human being that he may be breathalyzing himself to make sure he is above the legal limit, and therefore maintaining his status of being fucking crazy), he cackles to himself and begins to tell the audience stories about his childhood, where he started off at his first job working “for one quart of moonshine a day.” Really. This man started out his life in the workforce with minimum wage being a full quart of illegal alcohol a day. He then takes us through the process of making moonshine, testing it liberally, and saying, “If you take two, three sips of that you won't have to have no music, you'll just start dancing 'cause you'll hear it!” This alcohol is so strong that two or three sips will make you hallucinate, and I'll hazard a guess and say that dancing to nonexistent music will probably be the very least of your problems. We meet some of Jim Tom's friends, including man who gives us such gems as “I'm an ordained Bible minister. And I like to make a little moonshine” and “Noo-ey (Noah of the Bible) made him some wine and got drunk, and Apostle Paul warned them women about getting drunk. What was makin' em drunk? Alky-hawl! (This is drunk-off-your-ass Tennesseean for 'alcohol').” Jim Tom spends the rest of the film dumpster diving and playing an accordion he found during one of his dumpster adventures, and the film fades to credits as Jim Tom drunkenly warbles “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” to said accordion.

Though nothing could come close to following that with any success, the rest of the week consisted of a huge picnic with literally the entire Park Service, during which I awkwardly saw a large amount of the pompous assholes who made my time in grade school almost as fun as trying to get Jim Tom to fill out a tax form, and was delighted to find that the worst one of the bunch had put on a ton of weight (I mean, if I went to Vandy I'd eat myself into a diabetic coma too) and hadn't gone any farther from home for the summer than I had. Other highlights included meeting a Jake Gyllenhaal look-alike during our trip to Park Fisheries and making as much eye contact with him as possibly without fearing a restraining order (which, as it turns out, adds up to a lot of eye contact). Emily and I will be taking a trip to Fisheries soon. We also burned cookies and brought them over to our neighbors' house, meeting half a dozen Vegetation Management guys (with a profound love of...vegetation) and somehow managing to talk about porn within only twenty minutes of arriving. So far I'd say life here ranks about a 9.Awesome from a scale of 1 to Awesome, my only complaint being that no self respecting college student should ever have to see 7 AM, especially not in the summertime. But hey, it beats spending all day getting coffee for self-important corporate assholes like other interns, right?

Let's Feed Kate Moss to Precious.

2010-03-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

I suppose the time has come for two admissions to be made. 1: There will never be a Mexico Part 2 entry. Sorry. Long story short, we got pulled over by guys with machine guns and searched for drugs, went snorkeling in an underwater state park where we saw a "little" shark that was about six feet long, and Dad and I got Montezuma's Revenge, which is one of the most horrible things ever. 2: My blog posts seem to be products of sleepless nights away from the frenzy that is college, so they will never be regular. They will, however, bear interesting time stamps.

I love StumbleUpon. Unlike MyLifeIsAverage, Facebook, LameBook, Shitmydadsays, or any of the other time wasters I love to frequent, StumbleUpon will never run out of material. It takes material from all the dusky corners of the Internet and delivers it to your computer screen, custom fit for your enjoyment. You check some boxes and find random stuff that makes you happy. It's great.

Recently, I Stumbled Upon this fantastic page from a fashion magazine. Apparently the editors had decided to do a "Curvy" issue, so they found four beautiful models who fit the plus size criteria and took crazy gorgeous pictures of them. (Here it is, for reference: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/7poIV1/models.com/v-magazine/v-size-2.html).

If you're like every other person conditioned by thin being fabulous, you may be struck (especially by the first two pictures) at how uncomfortable it is to find this body type appealing. This changes by Picture 3. By this point, I was struck by how fantastic these women looked. Exquisite faces atop voluminous goddess bodies, these women embodied the ancient ideal of the Roman and Grecian female. As I scrolled down to the picture of all four models in one shot, I was struck by the fact that these women were unlike any plus sized models I had ever seen, some of them even being on the small size of curvy. After seeing all the pictures, the first two grew more beautiful by the second, especially in keeping with the idea that the camera adds ten pounds no matter who you are, and most women look like this, some not even lucky enough to have the incredible faces to accompany the controversially gorgeous bodies. A few males who happened to be in the room found themselves in agreement, and I was satisfied with the experience and ready for more Stumbling.

Recently I revisited this site. Seeing that there were comments on the post, I read through about half of them and found myself ready for another rant. You're excited.

Perhaps an illuminating backstory is in order. You know me. I used to be a rail thin little girl, so androgynous that girls used to suggest that I drink Miracle Gro for breasts (we were like eleven, all these girls are obese now). I was incredibly self conscious, then literally overnight I became a victim of puberty and my life changed. All of a sudden, my mother was (and still is, despite my no longer being fourteen) constantly admonishing me to pull up shirts that had always fit me fine so that my cleavage was covered and the gross old man behind the counter could finish bagging our groceries without dropping the eggs again. I became the recipient of constant lewd gestures and remarks from total strangers. I found myself in a new and confusing territory: developing the skills to know when a person actually finds you interesting and is worth your time, or is only offering you a summer job because you look like a fourteen year old Betty Boop and his wife stopped having sex with him once she found out he was a pedophile. I suffered a horribly embarrassing moment when the principal of my middle school (it was a small school) pulled me aside and advised me to start wearing a bra because it was distracting to the other students. Shit. When had this happened and how should I deal with it?

(I know, I know. What a terrible dilemma to have, right? Oh wow, you've got breasts and people get distracted by them. Poor you. I bet you bitch about winning free shit off of Coke bottle caps and whatnot, don't you? (No. I love free shit.))

Unfortunately, along with the with-great-cup-sizes-comes-great-responsibility deal, there's also the added issue of body type. I will never again be the kind of girl who can wear clothes without trying them on. I don't just have curves up top, I've got them everywhere. God, if being in high school isn't torture enough, being curvy in the age of walking coat racks is. Jeans today (especially skinny jeans) create a muffin top that highlights your midsection even if you're a size two. If you've never burst into tears because you can't zip up a dress past the middle of your back, count yourself lucky. Being ashamed of your body is a terrible thing, but what's worse is being ashamed of a body that men like Botticelli thought was ideal to use in depicting a GODDESS. A freaking GODDESS. Not just any Goddess, mind you, but freaking VENUS. Literally every guy I have ever dated immediately began dating someone noticeably smaller, and the recent hipster clothing rage has officially designated me a Size Large. (I'm a size 6-8, and almost 5'9) All of this is enough to make even my boy Botticelli's Venus start crash dieting. Where can we turn for guidance to normalcy?

Um...not magazines, that's for damn sure. The obesity epidemic in the U.S. has forced the magazine industry to put really really fat people into their magazines under the plus sized category and call them curvy to make people feel better, but the actual plus sized label starts at a size 8, in some cases a 6. What is a growing young girl supposed to find healthy, then? The unhealthy, obese girl under the "curvy" category in Seventeen, or the unhealthy, androgynous girl in the advertisements? Shit. Sorry, female high school classes of 2018. You are gonna have body issues for a long time and it's Kate Moss's fault. Apparently that bitch once said, "No food tastes as good as skinny feels." I almost feel bad for her, she's clearly never been allowed to eat anything but rabbit food, and WOW I could kill for some fettucini alfredo right now.

So. Back to the comments on the StumbleUpon spread. While many women were impressed and stunned by the beauty and normalcy of the women depicted, an alarming number of people seem to find these ladies "fat," "obese" and "gross." These people claim to be "all for curves," but leave no room for anything but runway sizes. One person actually stated "too skinny" to be a size 4 and below, and "plus sized" to be a size 8 and above. So...size 6 is it, huh? (What size are you, I wonder?) What's worse is that someone wrote in to say that that they actually knew most of the women in the pictures, and that they all lead healthy lifestyles with ample exercise. So these women are beautiful, make good lifestyle choices, and are unfit to grace the pages of a magazine because they have the defining characteristics of a woman? I know it's a tired argument, and much of America's fault lies with the aforementioned media sanctioned extreme, but if it's enough of a problem to affect an otherwise self confident, reasonably intelligent young woman, what is it doing to young girls who have no one in their lives to remind them that they're beautiful? Ironically, I read Cosmo like Kate Moss reads her bathroom scale, and recently they released a little tidbit stating that men generally like women about two sizes bigger than the ideal that women have jammed down their throats like Mary-Kate's post meal finger. Hmm...what size is that, now? Ah. About sizes 6-8. Yet when I turned the page to read about the Ten New Ways To Make Him Your Bitch, the female model they had owning the hot guy was no bigger than Kid Rock, with about the same amount of estrogen.

I go to school with an official model, and her suitemate is my best friend at Yale. My friend recently informed me that her suitemate's rib is doing just fine, but apparently someone hugged her a bit too hard and broke it. That's what people pay money to see wear the clothes that will soon be available to them in generic form at their closest Macy's. Meanwhile women who look like Precious are our role models for curves and those of us who will find ourselves neither on a 60 Minutes special on obesity nor at hipster parties wearing an American Apparel lace body suit and pulling out a microscope when men want to see our breasts are forced to haul out the Ben and Jerry's and pray for the return of the fashionable poncho: Hollywood will never love us, so we'll embrace our inevitable spiral into the land of the Big Dawgs clothing store and hope we're already married by the time we forget what our feet look like.

(Okay fine fine we're all beautiful as long as we're healthy, skinny could never feel as good as eating sushi to the point of bursting, and Kate Moss probably has a terrible sex life. (Just Googled it. She had sex with Johnny Depp. Fuck. Big Dawgs, here I come.))

Home Is Where the Heart Is

2010-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

Ugh. Doesn't it bother you that such a famous saying ends with a dangling participle? Irks the hell out of me. As I'm sure it's becoming apparent by now, I only really have time to write about my own stuff when I'm home, and I've always got new things on my mind at that time. I wrote half of the Mexico blog and my power went out, so God knows if I'll ever have little enough going on in my head to finish it...I may abandon ship. Don't judge me.

Despite the fact that traveling gets easier, and you start memorizing airports and CT Limo trips, going home never ceases to be strange. Furthermore, the more time you spend away from home, the less it feels the way you remember it when you get back. My idea of "home" has become so scattered, so far removed from the familiar concept with which I grew up. Of course, I've talked about life as a college nomad before. I talked about how I fell in love with Yale, how home ceased to be enough for me, and how difficult it was to return.

Days after I wrote that post, fate stepped in and threw me a line. I spent the summer falling so deeply in love with a person that I barely recognized myself, or my family for that matter, since I spent so little time with them. I became that girl, the one who all her friends eventually start hating because she's so wrapped up in her boyfriend. I was unbelievably ignorant and blissful, despite the fact that I had gone down this road before, and it ended in epic failure. The summer ended, and life spat me out at the foot of my beloved Yale before I had time to take a steadying breath. As ecstatic as I was to see my best friends and get back into the life I love so well, I was miserable. I spent the first night there sobbing uncontrollably on the phone with my dear boyfriend, begging him to jump a plane and ease my suffering. And I never beg.

Inevitably, however, Yale worked her magic on me again. I started taking incredible classes, going to incredible parties, and realizing how badly I'd missed my incredible friends. I still talked to my boyfriend daily, sometimes more than once a day, and it never felt like a chore, but work was piling up. Little disagreements that didn't seem too bad were magnified greatly by the distance. I began experiencing the familiar horrible sinking feeling that I'd felt the year before-I was losing my dedication to my long distance relationship, and it was heartbreaking. The problem with being the jerk who ends the relationship is that it isn't nearly as easy as it looks to the other side. You don't just stop feeling, stop caring about this fantastic person to whom you've given so much of your time. Your beautiful synchronicity is damning in that you feel exactly the pain you're causing. He answered the phone by telling me he'd just gotten his hair cut, because he knew I didn't like how fresh haircuts looked on guys, so it would be grown out just the way I liked it by the time he came up to see me in two weeks. My heart broke.

Being friends after ending a relationship like that is ideal, yet practically impossible. This person was a huge part of your life, and you still love them dearly, but just as you can't shut out your guilt and unhappiness with making the right decision, you can't shut off your love. You try to move on and end up eating way too much kettle corn and Sour Patch Kids, but in the end you just end up gaining five pounds and having one more thing to be unhappy about. We tried, but friendship just led us right back to where we'd started, and I finally broke off all contact in an attempt to save his heart by just a little, if I could.

Every homecoming you make is a visit with the ghosts of who you used to be. You see your old preschool and remember life as a tiny ball of excitement, how everything was so much bigger and bolder. You see your high school and remember the screaming fans at Friday night football games, and the many people you were in just those four years. You see the places you went when you were in love and remember how every color stood out as perfect, and every night ended in an overwhelming sadness mixed with excitement to spend the whole day in love again tomorrow. How can you possibly compare to that ghost, who explodes with passion and love for every breath she takes? And are you really so pathetic that you need to be in love to be that way again?

Yeah. I think you do. I think that happiness comes in a beautiful array of forms, but there is no happiness like the glow that comes from love. We need it, as primal beings, to give us reason to continue our lives, if not purely for the biological need to reproduce. We're both victims and honored guests of love, and every ounce of what you get must be eventually given back (yeah, Avatar reference).

So home has new meaning for me now. One home has unrelenting work, unrelenting play, and priceless people. The other has incredible family and friends, but ghosts that creep in when you go to bed for the night and your mind wanders to all the places it shouldn't. If home is where the heart is, then I'm even more confused than ever before.

How's that for ridiculous melodrama?

An Elitist Horse of a Different Color

2009-10-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

Hello, faithful readers. It's been an obscenely long time. I'm sure that you have many questions, such as "Where the hell have you been?" or "Why isn't this blog about the second half of your Mexico trip?" Good for you. Remember, there are no stupid questions.

I go to Yale. You know this. I have articulated in previous blogs my extreme and plentiful love for my school, but there are a few things that I feel the need to address in the form of a lengthy diatribe involving bitter sarcasm and thinly veiled examples of my own real life experiences. Oh goody, you're excited.

It's no secret that I come from a rural area-the foothillls of the Appalachian Mountains in East Tennessee. It's an area filled with incredible contrasts, from the beautifully furnished cabins atop the hillsides to the sadly dingy single wide trailers, the front yards filled with dirty and broken children's toys, in the lower elevations. I went to school with some big fish in our small
Gatlinburg pond-daughters of head honcho developers, children of cabin company owners, hell even the school superintendent's kid had a hand in my school social life...she was my teacher in 8th grade. While most of these people were not the most pleasant specimens of man, we commoners dealt with them as a necessity of life. The wealthier girls scrambled to buy the latest designer bags, batting their heavily mascara caked eyelashes at the Belk cashiers who wrapped up their $300 Louis Vuitton or Dooney and Bourke for safekeeping on its journey to be exhibited on Gatlinburg Pittman High School desks. You really weren't anybody if you didn't carry a designer purse, or at least a really good fake one for a season or two. The boys displayed their wealth differently, with shiny rims on their Mustangs (Mustangs were huge at GP for some reason), and ridiculouslyfuckingloud speakers that shook your spine if you were unfortunate enough to have to sit in the back seat of their cars. I won't lie, I scrambled to buy that designer bag (I shamefully spent far more than I would care to admit on purses in high school), and date that obnoxious guy with the spinal disk displacing subs, but I tried not to get caught up in the blatant classism that dominated my school-there was a vast schism between the girls with the D&B's and the kids who sat in the back and wore the same clothes to school nearly every day because they couldn't afford anything else.

There's no getting around it-teenagers are assholes. Some of the most zealous social climbers you will ever meet, they step on any toes in the way of the coveted lunch table, or highly admired social events, matter of fact, the more toes the better. Some of the cruelest displays of human behavior I have ever witnessed occurred right before my eyes in the manner of tricking the poor girl in class into thinking one of the varsity basketball players wanted to take her to prom, or forming fake friendships with the kid who smelled a little bad because he literally slept in his car for lack of better accommodations, only to make fun of him afterward and high five all around in self congratulatory celebration. My family makes a nice living now that they have a growing business and have made a name for themselves in the community, but it wasn't always that way. I remember being that girl, the one who bought her clothes at the thrift shop or Wal-Mart because it was cheap, or the one who got embarrassed when her parents picked her up from school because they did so in a super ghetto Mazda Protoge with a dent in the side from the time her mom got mad and threw a bowl at her dad's car. I could relate to the less affluent kids in high school because up until rather recently, I had been one of them.

When I got into Yale, I was ecstatic. A light at the end of the tunnel, Yale was my idealistic paradise, filled with people who cared about the environment, who liked you for your intellect not your designer purse, and maybe even voted Democrat every once in a while (a stretch, I know). To some extent, Yale met my expectations. But as time wore on, I began to pick up on a different type of elitism...intellectual elitism. "You didn't learn Calculus when you were five?" "Your most exciting guest speaker was Bruce Pearl, and you didn't even have a speaker at graduation who wasn't a member of the student body? ""You pronounce Kant like can't? Is that a joke?!" "What private school did you go to? Oh...well uh, where are you from? Oh. OH. Right. Well I know some really rich people in Nashville...you don't know them because you actually live in Bum Fuck Nowhere in the mountains? Oh. That's cool that your parents hike for a living, my obscenely successful parents would love to have free time to do recreational activities. Of course that would mean that I might even have to fill out one of those horrible forms...what are they called? FAFSAs? Ugh. Financial aid gives me hives."

I quickly retired my Dooney and Bourke and set about trying to learn about this disgustingly fascinating creature-the Privileged Legacy. You see, being of the upper crust isn't easy. You have to keep up with maintenance on all four of your homes (don't be ridiculous, Tara, we had to sell one because of this terrible recession...no not the one in Rome, the other one. No, not the beach house. The one in Palm Beach. Terrible ordeal.), you have to send your children to the best schools $40,000 a year can buy, and push them to be at least 10 times more successful than you were at their age. "You don't have a BlackBerry? Why not? Why don't you need it...haven't you founded your own non-profit yet?" It's an interesting breed, the P.L. They're not just extraordinarily well off, they're also incredibly intelligent, so their massive intellects combined with immaculate breeding (fluency in Latin by sophomore year in high school, working knowledge of all levels of classic lit from every major time period, and a couple of really nice suits), they are power houses of superiority. I remember talking to a classmate last year, trying to hard to understand how he could truly believe he was the most intelligent person he knew. Another incident ended in my finding out he had stocked his iPod with a lot of really cool, diverse music solely for show, so that when someone scrolled though his music they'd think he was a fun and musically worldly human being. Who are these people?!

After beating my head against a wall for being the dumbest hick at Yale, someone who mispronounces names of famous authors because she's only ever seen them in writing, can't name all the members of the House by looking at them, and doesn't remember logarithms because, well, she didn't actually learn about them in school, I finally got it. I started seeing the cracks in the porcelain faces of these people I envied so much, starting with their families. The relationship a P.L. has with his/her family is often a functional one, but (sadly) rarely more than that. Parents serve to pay your way through life until you get a job of your own, a favor you repay by becoming them when you grow up, starting with getting in to an Ivy, of course. Preferably their alma mater. I have heard countless classmates talk about their future careers, only to find out that they'd picked them based solely on their average incomes. The next generation of 15 hour a day work fiends sits next to me in lecture, takes on 50 extracurriculars as resume padders, and drinks until he passes out, unaware for a few hours of the pressure squeezing every last drop of dignity and creativity from his system until he's ready to be a man.

There are some P.L.s who aspire to be politicians. They live in a fantasy world filled with intellectuals of the same caliber, so they never really have to interact with the real world, a skill I'm going to go out on a limb and say might be essential for enacting real political change. The political organization meetings they go to consist of a bunch of really smart and well informed kids sitting around debating situations they cannot possibly fathom because they aren't part of the scenery outside their Range Rover's window. Every once in awhile they'll go outside and spend an hour at a soup kitchen, or give change to the Flower Lady, and for them that's enough.

It takes a special kind of person to think being at Yale is no big deal-someone who's spoiled. Certainly, someone who has vast expectations placed on his shoulders, a head full of memorized facts and countless pages of nicely written fiction, and a working understanding of economics, but a child all the same. Someone who has never had to choose between field trips and new clothes, who has never used a food stamp, and who has never heard the words "We're going to have a meager Christmas this year, sweetie." Someone who has never had to make their own way in the world without the family name getting a well manicured foot in the door, who has never participated in a cause because it was something they really believed in, not because they stood to gain anything but personal fulfillment. A baby, who stands alone at parties filled with strangers because Daddy's money won't help him here, who sits silently when good music is discussed because he hasn't memorized what to say in this situation, and dares utter the words, "Yale isn't really a big deal...it's just kind of expected" without realizing how ignorant he really is about the world around him, and how damn close he was to being born into a trailer trash family in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

I'm definitely not saying that everyone at Yale is like this. There are a lot of kids here who work incredibly hard for what they've got, and I admire them completely. There are also a lot of kids who are legacies, or very affluent, or both, who are fantastically down to earth and fun to be around. However, the spoiled Privileged Legacy is certainly a prevalent character on the Yale scene, and was a huge part of my decision to let go of my doctor/lawyer dream and major in something that will barely keep bread on the table, but will make me happy and fulfilled as an influential citizen of the world. I would never want to do my children the disservice that my classmates' parents have done them-so much fantastic education, no real world in which to apply it. A life of love and satisfaction trumps one of nice cars and crisp suits any day of the week.

T.

Mexico: It Really Is Another Country, I Promise.

2009-08-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

Tradition drives my family in the strangest ways. One Thanksgiving, when I was about nine or ten, The John Lennon Collection happened to be playing the song 'Cold Turkey' on the stereo. I was cute and naive, and thought the song was wonderfully appropriate for the holiday. Every year my family and I still listen to that CD, pretending that song is about our lovely Tofurkey as opposed to the horrors of heroin withdrawal. Charming. Yet another tradition in our family, albeit a less unique one, is our two week August family vacation. This vacation has varied greatly throughout the years, from Scotland to Florida, sometimes with my entire family, sometimes just myself and my parents. Something always goes horribly wrong, but we always have a great (or at least memorable and entertaining (looking back on it years later)) time. This year, my mother decided very early on that we needed a family reunion. Reunion here is defined as meeting and spending a week with a bunch of people I have never met (or at least have no recollection of meeting) while watching corn grow for a week in Iowa. This was to be followed by another week canoeing and desperately fighting for our lives as the mosquitoes tried to claim every delicious inch of our skins in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. As appetizing as this upcoming vacation seems in retrospect, at the time of this plan's unveiling I was less than overwhelmingly enthused. My father, it seems, also shared my view, and we unwittingly teamed up to wear my mother down and convince her to go somewhere less awesome. We settled on Mexico, with the intent of staying at an all inclusive resort.

At this point, I feel that it is necessary to describe my family's usual vacation style. My parents spent their honeymoon in Hawaii. Except instead of hanging out on the beach and watching the natives wear horrendous grass skirts and dance for dollars while spitting in Mainlanders' drinks and cursing the ground they walked on when they weren't looking, my parents spent their time climbing volcanoes and freezing their asses off on the tops of craters. We've backpacked the Grand Canyon on Christmas, hiked the cliffs of Scotland, and canoed the Everglades on our family vacations. An all inclusive resort was really the most adventurous thing our family could do at this point, though we all cast our serious doubts over our abilities to just hang out and drink on the beach. By 'we' I mean my parents. As a self respecting 18 year old girl enrolled in college, I foresaw no trouble with this sort of vacation whatsoever. However, my parents decided on a compromise: two nights in a hotel at the ruins of Chichen Itza, and five nights at an all inclusive resort outside of Cancun. We hired a travel agent to take care of the details, a decision that we later came to somewhat regret (she was really obnoxious). After a flurry of planning, it was settled and we were off.

We spent two nights at my grandmother's house in Marietta, Georgia (we were flying out of the Atlanta airport). As my phone alarm went off at 5 AM the day our flight was to depart, I was filled with a sense of excitement. This wore off by 5:01 as I realized how freaking early I was up. Truly ridiculous. Regardless, I dutifully arose and took care of all the last minute packing, got in the car, and embarked on my Mexican vacation. We arrived at the Delta counter and immediately encountered problems. We spent a lovely ten minutes at the automatic kiosk, attempting to figure out how to scan our passports, before a nice lady in a Delta uniform suggested we join the line to have an actual human being take care of our check-in. We did so and got through security without anyone getting strip searched (this actually kind of happened to my grandmother on another trip, so it really was a concern). We settled down to have breakfast at Moose Coffee or something like that, and then headed to the newsstand to get gum and magazines. I got my first taste of Mexico there, by picking up a Cosmo to purchase and realizing that it was, indeed, in Spanish. The word 'SEXO!' was prominently displayed on the front cover, which, as you have probably determined, means 'SEX' in Spanish. Easy, I thought, this whole Spanish thing isn't as hard as everyone makes it seem. Our plane ride went off without a hitch, and I entertained myself by watching obviously just married couples (they liked each other way too damn much) canoodle, and taking discreet photos of the terrifying tattoo on another passenger's leg. We landed in Cancun and disembarked. As soon as we got off the plane, we were handed a form that we had to sign stating that we did not have Swine Flu. The fact that this form was distributed AFTER our plane ride disturbed me greatly. We then visited the lovely Cancun customs area, followed by baggage claim. We grabbed our bags and headed for Immigration. Right before I hoisted my bag onto the scanner, I realized with a jolt that it was, indeed, not my bag. Fabulous. I apologized profusely to the annoyed Immigration officer, ran the wrong way towards baggage claim, had to run back and go the correct way, got stopped by some airport officials asking if I'd lost my bag, explained to them that no, indeed, I had inadvertently stolen someone else's bag, found my bag, wished good luck to whoever the owner of the stolen bag was, and then got in place at the end of the Immigration line to wait for another good while for my chance to be mocked by the officer. We then experienced a moment of brief panic upon being unable to find an Enterprise, which was erased when Mom checked the itinerary and announced that we were actually with Hertz. We lugged our bags out the door to wait for the Hertz shuttle, and I was hit by the most intense wave of humidity and heat in recent memory-a feat, considering that I live in Tennessee. We waited for the shuttle by the Welcome Bar, where one could actually purchase a bucket of beer. I know this because someone did, right in front of me. I love Americans. Especially American tourists. Their blatant disregard for authenticity in other people's countries astounds me-they have no qualms about eating at Mickey D's in Rome every day of the week and ordering a Bud Light when out Eurotripping. Their grotesque gluttony for cheap trinkets from Senor Frog's closely rivals their inability to speak the native language, yet firm belief that if one speaks more slowly and loudly they will magically be understood. Surprisingly Americans are not rated the Number One most obnoxious world travelers, however. That honor was very recently taken from the Germans by none other than...Italians. Interesting. At least they have good taste in shoes.

We got in the Hertz van and adjusted to the Arctic temperatures inside. I came to notice that most windows in Mexico are fogged over like the cab in the sex scene from Titanic...generally minus the hand print. My parents then proceeded to leave me outside in the scorching heat to watch the bags while they haggled with the rental people. Half an hour later we finally got into our car, a Dodge Attitude (cars in Mexico have well known makers, but weird model names), and headed for downtown Cancun. We were deliriously hungry. We wandered around Cancun on foot in the burning sun, arguing over where we should eat, until we were so overcome with famine that we stopped at a roadside stand to grab a burrito. The men eating at the stand looked at us with shock-we were very obviously the first white people to visit that particular eatery, probably ever. A few men quickly got up and offered their seats to us, apologizing in rapid fire Spanish. Not wanting to perpetrate the Americans=Jerks stereotype, I smiled and said the three or four words in Spanish I knew and nodded a lot. Turned out that the man running the stand was pretty much out of everything on the menu, so we tried some weird tortilla and feta-like cheese thing. It was lukewarm, but it contained calories and I was vastly satisfied. On the way back to the car, Dad told us that we were all going to get Montezuma's Revenge by the end of the day for eating at a roadside stand in downtown Cancun, though I don't remember seeing him complain when he ordered four of the cheese tortilla dishes and wolfed them down. Next to the car, I noticed that there was...a bush trimmed in the shape of a Pikachu! Random, but oh so exciting! We embarked on our adventure to Chichen Itza.

A Meditation on Facebook

2009-07-09T18:57:00.001-07:00

Notifications. Inbox messages. Friend requests. Event invitations. The little things that make our hearts go pitter pat when we log on to the universe's best modern time waster to date: Facebook. Ah, the early days of Facebook were great ones indeed. Before everyone's mother/little sister/great aunt Bethel had a Facebook, it was a place for social networking with your age group...and maybe even a little bit of rebellion for a few of us. This was one place where your language, political views, and pictures could only be viewed by the elite few you deemed worthy by accepting their friend requests. Your statuses could contain explicit language, your pictures could show crazy parties...hell, you could come out of the closet and only let your closest friends know, if you wanted to!

But then something happened. Slowly but surely, the privacy and elitism of Facebook started becoming diluted by the endless outpouring of MySpace trash who decided to take Facebook over and treat it like any old social network. It started with the tweens posting half naked pictures of themselves in seductive poses in their bathrooms. Mothers hearing about this "Facebook thing" and getting one for themselves, initially to check up on said tweens and their inappropriate activities. Soon enough, everyone's moms started friending each other, then telling their real life friends to get profiles. BOYS even started getting Facebooks so they could post about their new cars/sports events/wet dreams/whatever.

Facebook was forced to make a change. They couldn't keep up with the number of people joining and keep everyone occupied and happy. And so they invented the worst gadget of all: The app.

All of a sudden, you couldn't log onto Facebook without receiving 343920 notifications. While attempting to control your excitement, you would click on the notification flag and...Bobby Jill wants you to play Mob Wars! Jane Sue wants you to use Compare People! Herb Tyson wants you to use the Masturbation App! YOU CAN'T GET RID OF ME!!!

As if that wasn't bad enough, it became possible for groups and events to send Inbox messages at the drop of a hat. What happened to sacred space, huh? Spamspamspamspamspam. Everywhere. Facebook became a watered down, trashy, pathetic husk of the place it once was. You always have to friend your mother, or she'll come over from her personal computer into your room and demand to have personal time to peruse your profile. Your little cousin posts cleavage pictures of herself and names her photo albums things like, "Lesbian Sex with Cigarettes and Stuffed Animals." Your grandmother even has a "MyFace" even though she never uses it. Your mother, after deeming your profile unacceptable, proceeds to get tagged in fabulously incriminating photos involving trees, pole dancing, and obvious intoxication. Every five minutes someone's status pops up saying, "Veronica Slutbag misses her boyfriend SOOO much! I love you baby! Your my life!" Obvious grammatical error aside, Veronica Slutbag's status is offendingly personal and obnoxious, and is often the cause of the more single Facebook crowd's downward spiral into a cynical-blog-post demise. Of course there is also the Constant Updater, whose statuses go unchanged in intervals no longer than an hour or so, and whose entire wall is covered in their own status updates, along with the occasional Mob Wars update. This person is almost never doing anything interesting, but always letting you know about their status regardless. People like this are the reason I think Twitter would induce in me a murderous rampage of epic and unprecedented proportions.

There is also the issue of Facebook drama. Here is an example:

Sarah Whorebreasts is out with Gary! :-)
(Comments): Gary Cheaterballs at 10:09 PM
:-)
Sarah Whorebreasts at 10:10 PM
:-)
Holly Garysgirlfriend at 10:11 PM
GARY WHAT THE FUCK.

Holly Garysgirlfriend is going to KILL THAT FUCKING SLUT WHORE AND HER CHEATING BOYFRIEND.

Though this sort of drama rarely unfolds in such a timely and convenient fashion, we generally get enough snippets here and there to form a nice, big, scandalous picture in our heads and start the gossip. Another classic Facebook drama is the "Paul Branford and Rita Kennedy ended their relationship" followed by several million "Oh my God Rita if you need anything I'm here for you, babe! Stay strong!" comments.

And so we come around to the issue of Facebook stalking. Come on y'all, we're all guilty. Whether it's in a large group setting to make fun of a certain girl for posing the same in exactly all her pictures, or privately to look at that girl you like without anyone judging you or to see if your ex boyfriend has gotten the clap from his whore new girlfriend (fingers crossed!), you have Facebook stalked at some point in your life. No shame in it, boys and girls. Welcome to the Age of the Creeper.

But here's the kicker: Facebook is like crack. It's terribly bad for you, wastes unbelievable amounts of time, has no tangible benefit, and yet you can't get away from it. Despite its flaws, Facebook is an irresistible addiction, providing you with a constant flow of information and stimuli not unlike the idea of the Matrix. We need to be "plugged in" or we'll miss important stuff! Where would I be if I didn't see five million albums of various friends' travels abroad while I stayed home, or that ex boyfriend's status that says he has unprotected sex upside down in lava with his whore girlfriend and LOVES IT, or that post from my mom that basically states that she wishes I was a mute so we would argue less?

Probably a lot happier. But a lot less educated in the trivial dramas of my loved ones' lives (and six hundred of my closest friends). And education, dear children, is what America is all about.

T.

In Defense of Dan and Seth

2009-06-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Some debates in life are doomed to remain forever unresolved. What exactly is the meaning of life? (4.) Is it ever acceptable to mix brown and black? (Not unless you are a jungle cat.) Who actually did steal the cookie from the cookie jar? (Me.) Can you lick your elbow? (Oh yes.)

There are, however, some questions in life that through time and careful consideration can, in fact, be answered thoroughly and efficiently. Where exactly is the G-spot? Did David Carradine commit suicide? Is it acceptable to wear light colors to a funeral? What were the B52's smoking?

The question I am here to answer, however is not among those just listed. The answer is not, in fact, right behind the belly button, or yes unless you're incredibly naive, or yes as long as you pair the bright article of clothing with black, or what weren't they smoking. The question is: Who IS the perfect man?

The answer is clear, and it comes in two forms, with two lovely illustrations. Which I happen to have found side by side. Answer: Seth Cohen/Dan Humpfrey. Here you are, ladies and gents: http://img2.timeinc.net/people/i/2007/gallery/gossipgirl/adam_brody.jpg

You may be saying something along the lines of, "Wait, wait. I have never heard of these schmucks. Who the hell are they?" If you are saying this, it is either because you are painfully ignorant because these men are pop culture icons, or you are Jewish because you're saying the word "schmuck." If it is the former, I apologize for you lack of need to exist, and if it is the latter, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Seth Cohen is your poster child, the reason many many gentile girls go for the nice Jewish boy. Lord knows they're definitely my reason for a trip or two to the Holy Lands (hehehe).

Still others may say, "Chuck Ba..." To which I reply with a hearty punch to the kidneys. Enough said.

Let us begin with a tour of the outside of these lovely men before we work our way in, to their hearts and minds. Does the phrase Tall, Dark, and Handsome ring a bell? If it doesn't, it's probably because you're from Denmark and no one where you live is attractive anyway. Sort of like Pierson College. But I digress. These boys are beautiful in the most unexpected of ways. I learned in Sexy Psych that women are attracted to men who are fit and muscular, men who look like they will pass on good genes to their offspring. Actually I didn't learn that in Psych. I think everyone just sort of knows that anyway. But Seth and Dan are attractive in a way that screams, "I am going to pass on the kinds of genes that contain likelihood of getting addicted to WOW and getting beaten up on the playground by men who will later write songs about hoes and Hennessey or work at a construction site for the rest of their lives before they beat their wives and die in a drunken haze of despair."

They also carry the looks that say, "I will love you in ways that Tom Brady never could. I will take our children to their various activities after school, I will bring home everything bagels because I know they're your favorite, and I'll make you soulful mix CD's and write about how much I miss you when you're gone." These are the men who will love maybe one or two women in their entire lives, but they will love them as epically and fiercely as rednecks love the NRA. They may not be able to open the jar of salsa you've been struggling with, but they'll certainly bring you ice and gauge your injuries with love and concern after you break your wrist trying to open it yourself.

Dan and Seth also have intellect and wit that is unparalleled by any lame ass football star. They read great novels, write better ones, and their musical tastes are formidable, to say the least. Seth is always ready with a quip and a sardonic smile, and Dan's knowledge of life and its events and players is enough to make you swoon. Or at least jump him in English class. These boys have wit and style, and have no need to constantly sulk and wear wife beaters, like the OC's Ryan, or screw anything with a pulse and a trust fund, like Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass. Which brings me to the next endearing part of these men: their innocence.

This is not to say that a man with past experience is anything to frown upon. Certainly Chuck or Ryan would never need instruction on ensuring that their current conquest enjoyed herself in the boudoir. However, there is an unbelievable amount of honor that comes with being the lady Seth picks as his love. Or being the party girl Dan picks as his muse. Whatever. It matters with them, it's special. In a time when physicality means next to nothing, it is amazing to think that there are people to whom a kiss is everything.

Go ahead. Say, "So what you're telling me, Tara, is that the perfect man is a nerdy FICTIONAL Jewish/doesn't celebrate Hannukah but has an inner yenta somewhere character in a T.V. teen drama whose main contribution to the show is witty quips and getting his heart ripped out by beautiful and popular females who soon move on to bigger and better things?"

To which I reply: "Yes."

But the guy these characters embody doesn't have to be Jewish (because he won't marry you anyway unless you're Jewish so don't waste your breath), or super nerdy, or even a fan of WOW. Though it helps.

But he does have to be witty. And not Chuck Bass. On this I will not bend.

Stay strong, adorable nerdy boys everywhere. She'll find you. Or I will. Whatever works.

Confusion and Apple Pie

2009-06-14T19:12:00.000-07:00

I spent the day today at the lake with one of my best friends. She and I have the kind of relationship where it honestly doesn't matter how long we're apart, we will still think alike and get along like family. Cassie's family is true Old South, born and raised, with one of East Tennessee's oldest names and longest legacies. Her father used to watch hunting shows while we cooked him dinner at his house, with his tub of congealed lard sitting by the stove and several point bucks mounted on the walls. As easy as it would seem to pin him in a particular redneck category, I'll be damned if Robert Maples can't talk circles around just about anybody. His style is direct-no need to hide behind confusing jargon or careful wording, he just tells it like it is, plain and simple, and he's usually right. He respects women (though is certainly not above a politically incorrect joke or two for his own enjoyment). He knows his current events, he's traveled a respectable amount of the world, and he's got a whip sharp sense of humor to boot. Tough as this perpetually sunburned, burly, grizzly bear of a man may seem, he loves his daughter with just about everything he has. Cassie is the opposite of everything her father seems to be: polished, classy, well dressed, articulate, and well read. The amount of misconception and stereotype one has to overcome being around these two is mind blowing, but always educational and entertaining.

And then there's Robert's brother, Roy. I first meet Roy today, at his lakeside campsite. Roy will be turning 78 tomorrow, I am told as we make our way across the lake. He comes from the side of Cassie's family that I am least familiar with, as I knew her cousin on her mother's side from high school, and Cassie's aunt and family on that side from countless visits to their house, racing golf carts during lunch breaks at band camp, making her shirts and ribbons for her Homecoming Queen campaign, and watching girly movies upstairs in her room. That side of the family has always been nothing but welcoming and wonderful to me, despite my ambiguous religious status and Northern parents. Just kidding. Sort of.

We pull up in the boat, Cassie and I jump out to start unloading, and I meet Roy. Roy is a smaller, less hearty version of his younger brother Robert. Cassie wishes him a happy early birthday and says she's brought him a present. He raises his eyebrows suggestively and points at me hopefully. Cassie laughs and says, no I am not his birthday present, but indeed a human being named Tara. He makes a comment about someone bringing a piece of apple pie to him but not letting him eat it. It is clear from his lascivious tongue wagging that I am the piece of pie. As used to dirty old men as I am by this point (as I posses the at times unfortunate "gift" of overstated curves and easy trust people I shouldn't), I am shocked that the Southern gentleman I was expecting was so up front about it. How difficult is keeping a still tongue in your head and being inappropriate in your head, anyway? I politely laugh it off and help Cassie set up the food away from Roy. We all gather by the picnic table and converse for a while as the burgers cook (I brought tofu dogs for myself). Roy pulls out his wallet and starts showing me semi impressive relics from his past, like his pilot's license and some sort of Army card. We begin to eat, then Roy asks Cassie why she brought such an ugly friend along.

Okay. The previous comments were offensive, but at least flattering in some twisted way. At least Cassie and I can laugh about them later. I had found myself offended by his lack of propriety, sure, but now I am mostly confused about his inconsistencies. Is this man just hell bent on being a jerk? Am I apple pie or ugly? Which offensive road are you taking, old man? 'Cause it's not fair to pick both, I don't know how to react to that. After hearing about "niggers" and having to remind Roy of my name several more times, I excuse myself to use their camper's bathroom. Upon returning, Roy asks me if the toilet seat held up all right, because he'd been doubtful that it would do all right without collapsing.

At this point, I have been in a bathing suit in front of everyone. I am a normal young adult female, and am self conscious about my appearance in general, but especially my weight. In a few hours this man has managed to insult my gender (making many comments about useless women), my appearance, and my pride. I am bordering on punching the man, but true to my Southern breeding I continue being polite. He whistles for his girlfriend (his "concubine" as he called her, as he also had a wife), and he explains to me that he has two kinds of whistles: "a dog whistle and a woman whistle, depending on who I want to pet." I laugh hysterically, because at a statement that ridiculous, what else can you do? Except maybe cry.

The conversation turns to politics. I prime myself for a fiery debate in which I verbally steamroll Roy and make him cry. I tense up for his racist anti-Obama remarks and get...rants about Bush's failures and comments on his pleasure at Obama's stimulus policies and environmental ideals.

WHAT?

I recover from my full on head explosion without anyone noticing. I listen with growing interest (and AGREEMENT) to his detailed, educated arguments and political morals with even more confusion. This man is the epitome of a dirty old Southern man stereotype: rude to women, racist, and a fan of Bud Light. How can he have intelligent world ideals and educated opinions? Not that I mean to imply that being a Democrat is the only way to be intelligent and educated, but that he would choose to educate himself to the point that he would feel exactly the opposite of his expected position catches me completely off guard.

I round out my visit to the lake with a few well timed jabs at Roy, much to the group's amusement, and leave feeling less offended and fat than I had hours earlier. I actually think I may like Roy. I think I enjoy that he has no pretenses and practices no forces nicities, even at times to the point of being obscene. I actually learned a lot from him today. I guess I could make some sort of poignant statement about books and covers and judging, but I think I'll leave it at this. I think it says all it needs to.

Life As A College Nomad

2009-06-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

No one is ready for college. I bet I was at least 34532543 times more excited about going away to college than you were, but that sure as hell didn't change the fact that freshman year kicked my ass. Living as a college student is sort of like living like a Plains Indian. You never stay in one place for too long, always moving back and forth from home to school to internship to study abroad session. The food is always changing. You wear the same clothes a lot. Dorms are not much better than tepees. And always there is the chance that you will soon be eradicated if you don't step up your game. It's tough.

The biggest challenge with going away to me was the adaptation. Girls were never supposed to be smart in my high school. You weren't supposed to think differently from the people around you. You were supposed to be a Baptist, or at the very least a Methodist. Bush was a Godsend. You didn't take the Lord's name in vain. Arguments were disrespectful. Using extended vocabulary was uppity and insulting. It was completely appropriate to use the word "gay" as a synonym for "lame" and the word "Jew" as a synonym for someone not intelligent. A total of two black people, one Jewish-converted-to-a-Southern-Baptist, five Asian Indians, and two Vietnamese (a set of twins) students made up the entire non white population at my school over all four years. I spent my entire childhood editing myself, vaguely answering religion questions to avoid persecution, and being the weird nerdy girl who believed humans evolved from dolphins or something like that. Winters consisted of two days of slushy snow and summers scorched and melted with their humidity. My acceptance to Yale was my ticket out. I. Could. Not. Wait.

There's a song in the Disney movie Hercules called: Zero to Hero. It's pretty self explanatory...Hercules was your average civilian...oh no wait, now he's a god. Crazy.
My first year at Yale was the opposite of that. Hero to Zero...or at least Weirdo to Boring. Multi-Grain to White Bread. Chocolate Ganache to Twinky. War and Peace to Babar. Grand Marnier to Keystone Light. EVERYONE was so much more interesting, more accomplished, more intelligent, even had better music on their iPods than I did. I saw no sunshine in the entire month of February. I almost died of Pneumonia throughout the entire winter. So I did what any normal Southern Appalachian girl from a public school and a small town would do: I cried a lot. Called home and freaked my parents out by telling them I sucked and didn't belong at Yale. Mom was sympathetic, Dad told me to quit feeling sorry for myself and study.
So I sucked it up and started changing. Started reading the Times. Got rid of any trace of a Southern accent. Listened to new music. Learned how to play video games. Got excited about foreign speakers and internships in Ghana. Bought a huge ass North Face ski jacket. Things started falling into place. I fell more in love with the school and the people there than I had ever loved anything else (other than my dear family of course). Yale became the topic of every conversation, the excitement of every day, and the reason for every action.

Then I did a really stupid thing. I fell for a guy at home over Christmas Break. All of a sudden, my life was split between Yale and home, my allegiances were questioned, every moment spent on school was a cause for jealousy, every moment spent on him was a point or two off my final grade. It came down to a decision. I subconsciously picked Yale, he consciously picked someone else. I lived. I finished my year and spent the ride home listening to Lil' Wayne's I Feel Like Dying and reliving my last moments at school with a longing I didn't realize I could feel.

I walked through the door to my house, luggage in hand, and was greeted by massive amounts of diarrhea on the floor and a bashful German Shepherd. My parents immediately started fighting over whose dog did the most damage to our house, and all my clothes got covered in dog hair within several minutes. Welcome home.

Now my task is adjusting back to a level of person that my small town can handle. I just want to get through the summer without someone in a white bedsheet burning something in my yard. I have to go back to using shorter words and less obscure references. I've fallen behind in the Times (hehe pun). I try not to tell people where I go to school so they don't try to beat me up. It helps that I've got friends and a wonderful new guy to get me through, but I spend our conversations in constant fear that I'll slip up and confirm suspicion that I am, indeed, an elitist asshole. I've quit wearing pearls and my drawl is back. I'm looking to buy a pickup truck. I spent some time in the Southern sun and actually blistered. I traded my backpack for an overstated D&G purse. I never wear my glasses and I never go to the store without makeup on.

Going back to school should be interesting.

Dear Jews in Muslim Lands Professor:

2009-06-11T21:45:00.000-07:00

This was the evaluation I sent in to my professor this past semester. It was originally posted on Facebook, but I wanted to post something so my wall didn't look so empty, and it's too late at night to write something original. I'm sure you'll live.

Dear Jews in Muslim Lands Professor:

I wanted to take this time to thank you for enriching my collegiate experience. The tireless deluge of useless knowledge that you see fit to impart during every lecture that I have attended has created an appreciation in me for early Jewish history that could only be replicated perhaps by being attacked by a mob of ancient angry Jews wielding stale matzo and screaming obscenities in Hebrew (are there obscenities in Hebrew?). You have granted me a true appreciation for early Jewish writings and poetry by providing a four hundred page course packet filled with obscure, dry writings that only a Freshman Orgo student would enjoy reading as a reprieve from countless labs and textbook work. The only sliver of enjoyment I have managed to glean from your class comes from my private musings as to the origins of your blazer, jeans, and bright red Crocs fashion statement-and even that has sadly grown stale with time and the fact that it, indeed, never changes.
Truly the best part of attending your lecture is the fact that the only people who see fit to attend class are seniors attempting to fulfill their last requirement for a History major, or the countless athletes who were sadly misinformed that your class was a gut (I also received this treacherous e-mail, and am making it a personal goal to seek out its author and inflict pain and suffering upon them to the highest degree). At least the athletes fill my daily attractiveness quotient...though they are sadly lacking in the scintillating conversation department. No matter. Facebook chat does wonders for keeping a body awake, though sadly not for absorbing your twenty minute tirades concerning Pirqoi ben-Baboi's personal family history, which would have been helpful to know for the hour test for which you so poorly prepared us.
My biggest thanks to you is in regard to the 10-12 page paper that you assigned with literally no guidelines or examples from which your students could even begin to attempt to glean any information whatsoever and utilize it in forming a thesis. Perhaps you are unaware of the basic policy of assigning a paper, so out of pity I will enlighten you. It is the point of view of those who are sane that ANY SORT OF GUIDANCE WHATSOEVER concerning paper topics is the polite-nay, the necessary thing to offer as a professor. However, I can't say that I blame your lack of knowledge in this area, seeing as how your grading of my short essay on our last exam literally consisted of your circling my essay and writing a question mark at the top. I suppose after attending your lecture I should have anticipated that words are not exactly your strongest suit, and for having the misconception that you want your students to actually learn anything I apologize. However, in my never-ending quest for knowledge I took the plunge and sent you an e-mail concerning my difficulty understanding the (lack of) guidelines for our 10-12 page paper on...nothing. I very politely detailed my struggles and pleaded for you to simply post an example of a paper you had found acceptable from the previous year. This is not a radical idea, in fact I had the pleasure of having a sane teacher just last semester (you simply don't know what you have until it's gone) who felt that his guidelines may have been a bit too confusing, so he did the very thing I requested of you-he posted an old essay that met his guidelines. How shocking and delightfully forward thinking of him. Remind me to send him a fruit basket in thanks. However, when I made my request you saw fit to respond with one sentence, without even bothering to write a greeting at the beginning of your e-mail. What was that response, you may ask? After weeks of agonizing over the topic of this paper, assaulting classmates and throwing myself at their feet, begging for some sort of insight into what they, as fellow prisoners of this travesty of a class were using as their topic? You responded with, "Reread the guidelines."
Well Professor Marcus, I did reread the guidelines. Several hundred times, as a matter of fact. I visited the Classes V2 server and meditated on your guidelines for hours, printing them out and turning them upside down, burning the paper in search for some sort of code written in invisible ink, even bringing them to my first seder, hoping that perhaps by attending a Jewish celebration I could appease God and he would take pity on me and reveal the hidden truths that as a non-believer I simply was not privy to witnessing. Alas, my attempts all ended in epic failure, and I am just as lost as the fateful day I read that useless syllabus and began my journey of pain and eternal confusion. So thank you again for destroying any interest I may have had in your travesty of a course. You have slain my naive freshman self, she who believed that all classes had interesting points of view, and that all professors cared about their students and wanted them to learn. From this metaphorical extinguishing of life has come a new me, a rising from the ashes, if you will, a phoenix of a young woman who will never again take a class from anyone who has ever met you. Thank you for making the final push towards my decision to major in Underwater Basket Weaving. You have been instrumental in my development as a human being, and for that I am forever in your debt.

Sincerely,

T.

On Blogging

2009-06-11T21:20:00.000-07:00

I dislike the word "Blog." To me, it conjures up visions of...bogs. With frogs. Violent frogs that flog. Needless to say, this visual image is off-putting at the least, and downright disturbing at the most.
I've also always thought of bloggers as self important, free trade coffee drinking hipsters with loudmouthed notions of fairness and bohemian lifestyles, as they blog on their expensive Mac Books, with their BlackBerry on the right, Urban Outfitters bag on the left, and Ray-Bans perched atop their carefully disheveled hairstyles, while Vampire Weekend plays in the background. What a shame that being sympathetic to the starving artist is so expensive! To me, hipster culture is a grotesque farce, mocking poverty and proletariat ideals with four dollar lattes and "homeless couture." My God, even the keffiyah, worn as a symbol of various Middle Eastern heritages, is used as a FASHION STATEMENT. What is wrong with you people???

*Deep Breath* But I digress. It's true that dissecting and mocking hipster culture is an easy and cheap shot to take, but my rant has hopefully helped to illustrate my major hesitation and distaste concerning the world of blogs. However, I find myself drawn to the thought of an outlet more private than Facebook, but less cumbersome than a diary. Part therapy, part entertainment, and part ones and zeroes, maybe this blog won't tack on too many pretension points to my record.

But I'm writing on a PC. And I don't drink coffee. Deal with it.