Polite awakening
I was awake all night with my seasonal recurrent insomnia and I'm in that state where I'm so irritable I can't even wear wool. I am going to use this space to catalog everything that annoys me until I finally close this laptop.
1. People who use @signs and #hashtags on Facebook. That shit never worked there. I don't know if they're trying to make some kind of ubermeta social-media gag or what, but it just looks like they're too dumb to know that the Internet is not a singular entity, that Facebook and Twitter were developed by entirely separate companies and don't share a UI. I'm not @kimrollins. Seriously, stop calling me that. She is another person entirely. I don't "tweet." I talk and write. Twitter is also everything that's wrong with contemporary public discourse, but this is a point I may elaborate on separately.
2. People who refer to a pregnant woman as having a baby "in her stomach." Not unless she ATE a baby is there a baby in her stomach. If you can't bring yourself to say womb or uterus, such as when you are addressing a toddler, "belly" and "tummy" work. These are terms that refer to the abdominal area generally. The stomach is an actual organ used for breaking food down into its component nutrients. It is not in the reproductive business.
3. That show Modern Family. I hate it so much and don't know why there isn't more conversation about its insane level of sexism, given the show's wide viewership. Sorry, having a male couple raising a non-stomach baby is really not cutting it for me when the attitude toward women is so hopelessly regressive.
There was actually an episode where Cameron was very upset because the moms in the neighborhood considered him one of them, and he became desperate to prove his masculinity. Being identified with a female role is so diminishing that even an out gay man in a floral shirt finds it intolerable. Ask any drill sergeant who addresses the recruits he is trying to humiliate and break down as "girls" and "ladies:" there is nothing worse you can call a man than a woman.
What could be more Modern than a world in which all of the women are neurotic and none of them have careers? LOL! Look, teenage girls can be either smart or attractive, but not both! LOL! Look, Jay married a woman younger than his daughter and people act like this should be source of embarrassment for the daughter (because she's SO OLD) rather than for septuagenarian Al Bundy! Look, Jay's wife is basically a walking pair of tits for everyone to leer at and she speaks in indecipherable, superstitious gibberish because she's from a country south of the equator! But it doesn't matter because no one cares what she has to say anyway! Tits! LOL! Extra LOL for nationalism!
Look, Phil lied to his wife about bracing a bookcase against seismic damage, there was an earthquake, and his son nearly gets CRUSHED UNDER THE BOOKCASE! But any remorse Phil might have for indirectly injuring his son by virtue of Phil's own sloth isn't the major plot point! The major plot point is that Claire will be mad at Phil if she finds out he lied about the bookcase, and you know how impossible women are when they're angry! Women are so unreasonable when you lie to their faces and endanger their children's lives! LOL!
Wow, is this really one of a hilarious ongoing series of incidents where Phil is basically the household's overgrown fourth child who needs constant supervision because he can't be trusted, but he's, like, the protagonist? The person we're most meant to identify with? And he stages small rebellions against his wife-mother and routinely enlists the children against her? TRIPLE LOL. We are going to need more LOL.
I was going to pitch a piece about this to Jezebel, but they don't pay anything and that would involve watching a lot more episodes of this show. I'm troubled by the fact that I have retained so many of the characters' names -- more troubled than when I realized I had a favorite Kardashian (Khloe, of course.)
4. What happened to male chest hair? I'm really glad Man Men is a period show and Jon Hamm is forbidden wax his off to preserve authenticity.
5. Unless you are dealing with an animal or a child, you should never let your reaction to someone's actions be led by the notion that they need to learn "a lesson" and you are the one to teach it to them. Other human beings are not yours to manipulate. It's appalling how many times I've heard one adult say about another, "If I don't [respond this way], s/he won't learn anything."
It's true that how you respond to an unpleasant act will often inform the future behaviors of the person who committed it. However, the way to do that is by telling someone directly how you felt after the incident, or what the objective consequences of their action were. You don't put other human beings in a giant Skinner box wherein you either dole out an electric shock or a delicious pellet. That's a sign of a serious personality disorder.
I once wrote up a list of four phrases which, if I found myself thinking them or any variant of them, indicated that I was getting too wrapped up in a minor issue that was likely never going to be resolved to my satisfaction anyway. One of them was, "It's the principle of the thing." It is time to start doing something else when that phrase materializes in your head.
6. "Gee, Cracked was such a shitty magazine when I was growing up, but now it's a great website." WE KNOW; EVERYONE KNOWS.
7. You may have already noticed that every time you complain about Facebook, I post a comment that is some variant on "You should ask for your money back." I intend to keep doing this indefinitely. You can either restrict your complaints to a List I'm not in, delete my comments (it truly doesn't bother me when friends do this; your profile is your own and I am merely an intrusive guest), or just not make them.
I'm no great fan of Das Zuckerberg. It's just that your complaining is really tiresome. Do you even remember what Facebook looked like before the current iteration of its UI? Of course not. What we have now is how Facebook is supposed to be. Whatever changes are to come will eventually become how Facebook is supposed to be. This is a very agile medium, the internet. Pen and paper are always available if you prefer to keep in touch with friends the old-fashioned way.
Granted, I should probably shut up about this because Gmail just rolled out some changes this morning and I found myself mildly upset because they switched up my Tea Party theme. The tea gazebo is on the opposite side of the screen now (at right, rather than under the left nav), and the fox that lives in the gazebo, and his little duck and bunny friends are largely hidden behind text.
The Tea Party theme is wonderful. Over the course of the day you get to see the fox water his plants, make tea for his bunny friends, and feed his ducks and koi. At dusk he lights paper lanterns, and if you stay awake long enough you can watch him tuck himself in.
I hit the ominous "revert to old look temporarily" option and Gmail asked me why I didn't care for their redesign. I was very frank about my love for the fox and ducks.
Tangentially related: Every time you "Like" your own status, a half-acre of irreplaceable wetlands are destroyed.
8. When is bling going to be over? I've been carrying the same Derek Alexander bag for six years now because no one produces a midrange bag anymore that doesn't look like it was designed for a Vegas streetwalker. I don't want to gussy myself up in Swarovski crystals, because I am also not a 6-year-old pretending to be Princess Aurora. No t-shirt should ever be described as "encrusted." How do people even launder those things?
9. Here is a snotty comment I didn't just leave on Facebook because I thankgodfully remembered at the last minute that I had this document open: "Hmm, it's in an album called 'Wall Photos' but it's not a photo. It's just text against a background. If only there were some way of conveying words without opening a graphics program and creating a JPEG. Maybe someday we will have the technology. I will pray on this."
I'm writing every day again, friends. The sad part is that this sort of thing is largely what I'm writing, this self-indulgent flexing. But I'm working up my strength. Yesterday I took great pleasure in cutting off my long nails and filing them down to the narrowest of crescents. It's what I do when I'm ready to write something big: optimize my hands for typing. So stay tuned. I've been asleep for a long time. Not last night, but you know.