Tell me you read the story about the hermit:
Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.
The ways in which white people talk over music.
It’s that time again! Time for me to state a position which I then cloak in an large number of equivocations and enough self-doubt to render it meaningless, which is why I state so few positions:
Oh, man. Okay. You know, it’s not that I don’t think there’s a place for writing pieces like this for large audiences about your minor children (she’s definitely TRYING to make it more about her, less about her kid, which is a good rule of thumb, too), I get that this stuff is valuable to other parents in similar positions (see also: here), the internet has been a wonderful haven for parents trying to figure stuff out, but I think you should strongly consider using a pseudonym if you do. I think it’s a privacy violation. Making up a different first name for your kid is not meaningfully preserving their privacy. I think we’re going to start to see a huge amount of blowback over the next ten years from kids who are reaching adulthood and discovering the details of their life and struggles are all over the internet. There are people who get super upset (which is their right) about “what if some random perv in a different state saw this pic of my daughter in the background of a birthday party in a bathing suit on her Aunt Jean’s facebook” but who will literally broadcast their living, minor child’s private medical information and teenage bitchiness and mental health status for the eventual perusal of friends and lovers and college counselors and potential employers, and there is NO reason you need to splash your byline over that stuff. That’s for you. That is not to create awareness of anything. If you’re in a position, because you’re a big name baller, to be “my kid has x terrible disease the public is under-informed about, please give money for research,” I can get behind that. You can do that without sharing a billion personal details about another human being. You want to have a blog where info about your child’s autistic behaviors and the strain they put on your marriage gets updated daily? USE A PSEUDONYM.
Like, it shouldn’t be illegal, you can do it and be a great parent, and we all find our own comfort zone for what we will and won’t disclose as parents (the old George Carlin bit about people who drive faster than you are maniacs, people who drive slower are morons comes to mind), but…tl;dr: maybe don’t assume your kid will grow up to be a person with an identical relationship to yours towards online transparency. Assume your kid will be, like, at minimum, 25% more conservative about their privacy than you are. There is literally no downside to that.
Yes, I have now been inside every cranny of the Odgen temple. I have many thoughts, and will marshal them in due course. For now, I will merely say that it was very beautiful and they had a team of young women placing paper booties over everyone’s shoes on the way in, and when I saw the carpet in the Sealing Rooms AND the carpet in the Celestial Room, I GOT IT. Nicest material my feet have ever indirectly touched.
super cool profile of Julia Morgan, who was California’s first licensed female architect and her work on (amongst other things) YWCA buildings:
Morgan’s belief that women paying nominal fees to live in these residences should have more than just a bed and basin often put her at odds with the powers that be. Women on the boards of the organizations for which Morgan built “were very much entrenched in the class system,” McNeill says, “so they didn’t feel the need to create entertainment opportunities—that’s just fostering sin. But Morgan had been there” as a young woman and respected the residents’ requests for kitchen and entertaining spaces. So she put in cheap, reliable Pullman kitchens, normally used on trains.
omigod the washington post wrote about my literal favourite part of being alive, which is playing in this league (and getting my ass kicked by anna quindlen earlier this week):
Admittedly, it wasn’t a fair fight. Bushfield is the one-man impresario behind LearnedLeague, a booming, invitation-only, underground trivia competition I joined two years ago. As the creator and host, he is more Alex Trebek than Ken Jennings — who, incidentally, has been a member for three years, along with other trivia fanatics like Carter Bays (co-creator of “How I Met Your Mother”), Daniel Okrent (a historian who invented Rotisserie Baseball and served as the first public editor of The New York Times) and the novelist Anna Quindlen.
NEVER CHEAT (no seriously, how would you live with yourself and what would be the point?) NEVER FORFEIT (forget to play your match.) If you don’t know the answer, get it wrong with FLAIR and VIM. I have only ever referred one player, and he is a towering force in his rundle.
In misandry news, yesterday my husband borrowed Dracarys without asking, set his phone to go straight to voicemail, and made me LATE to the GYM. TO THE GYM. I used my anger to fuel my workout, and am now only fake-mad, but it was TOUCH AND GO for a minute there.
Our own Laura Passin wrote some gorgeous poems.
There is a good article at the American Spectator about how the True Enemies of American Culture are lesbians.
Here is an indirect link, I know no one wants to support the American Spectator directly (and rightly so!), but I got a kick out of it, perhaps also you will.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robert-stac…
Look out, everyone! LESBIANS!
“bring[ing] greater ideological resources to the battlefields of the Culture War” is probably not something I should put in the skills section of my resume, but damn if I don’t want to.
“Does anyone else notice how “lesbian” and “feminist” go together so naturally that the writer who did this interview, Kelcie Mattson, sort of took it for granted?”
Weird, because I see lesbians getting marginalized within the feminist movement all the time!
I especially like this little bit of rhetoric:
“feminism has attempted to marginalize (or at least to conceal from widespread public scrutiny) ”
as though “conceal from public scrutiny” is on a spectrum with “marginalize” — two dfiferent activites with the same goals. But obviously, “marignalizing lesbian rhetoric” means limiting its influence within the movement, while “concealing lesbians from public scrutiny so that we can introduce the Lesbionc Misandrist Matriarchy as a Trojan Horse through common core standards in your child’s middle school” is actually exactly the OPPOSITE of marginalization.
Perhaps the writer meant “minimize,” and got confused.
I DUNNO, I MEAN, last week I was walking down the street eating an ice cream cone and all of the sudden this lesbian comes up to me. she’s staring at my ice cream cone and like, trying to eat it. and then she just starts getting her little arms like all up in my hair. and then she touched my boob, and I had to smack her out of the way. and then she started following me, and I ran and ran and she followed, and she hit my butt, and then I kept running, and then she wouldn’t stop until I threw my ice cream cone at her and turned down a side-street. it was terrifying.
oh wait did you say lesbian? sorry, I thought you meant bees. I get those confused all the time
Well, you joke, but I think I’ve probably lost track of the number of times a lesbian has used her modified heavily barbed ovipositor to inject me with venomous apitoxin.
No…no wait, maybe I’m also thinking of bees.
Bees have a chitinous exoskeleton and a segmented thorax, and lesbians are women who like to have sex with each other, right? Or is it the other way around? Which are the ones with compound eyes?
BISEXUAL MANTIS SHRIMP ERASURE!
all the rest are bees, but this one
“Which are the ones with compound eyes?”
^^^
this one is lesbians
Well, I guess it’s true what they say, no one sees the world quite the way that lesbians do.
…said Monk Two to Monk One.
I wish men who made arguments like this would realize that it would be more difficult to make lesbianism seem like the only reasonable option if they’d just stop being nincompoops of the first water.
“When people ask about my kid, I almost always mention the speech delay. I’d like to stop doing that.”
This woman is the worst.
It’s a real bummer that that’s tucked in there at the end, because it sounds like she’s genuinely trying to change her attitude and be more accepting. Then it’s like, “But this is still the thing I emphasize most about my kid, who’s not perfect. Like me. Did I mention the Rhodes Scholar thing?”
Yes. Yes she is.
Also I dont think 14 months is so terribly delayed that you should scream at your kid for not walking. Dont a lot of them try walking around at around 12?
YES THIS. Some kids don’t even really start walking until 18 months – 2 years. Overachieving is right. Dear lord.
And why dont these parents understand that the time frame of hitting these milestones doesnt mean shit about how the kid’s life will pan out, because life is long and complicated and throws up a whole bunch of random harder lessons than how to say ‘ball’.
*grumble grumble grumble*
Seriously. *also grumbling*
Wow, that’s really amazing how you can rule out a developmental delay over the internet just like that! Imagine! Not even professionals can do that, but you have such amazing powers of perception that you can diagnose “not a problem, just a dumb parent” without even laying eyes on the kid! Stupid parents, noticing delays and getting professional evaluations. Because no kids with delays ever have problems and early intervention doesn’t matter, even if they did. And worrying and having emotional responses and wanting to make it okay, well, that’s just incomprehensible.
I misread ‘ball’ as ‘bail’ and thought: “harder lessons indeed”…
The rewards that come with celebrating my girl’s rich character have given me permission to see the fullness of my own.
I sort of kind of got over the horror of my child having some developmental delays, and this helped me realize what an amazing person I am!
I both understand the impulse to treat kids like a mirror and a manifestation of one’s own life, and want to eradicate that impulse from my own parenting style if I ever have kids (preferably well before the self-congratulatory “I made peace with my daughter’s flaws AREN’T I AMAZING” think piece phase of motherhood).
Any Toasties with advice on how to, uh…do that?
I realize I’m not that far along yet in the whole “I’m a mom” grand scheme of things, but I just try to remember that my wee offspring basically emerged from the birth canal with a personality all her own, and just like I am definitely NOT my mother (except sometimes), she is definitely NOT me (except sometimes). It keeps it in perspective. I see things that are decidedly my personality, but then sometimes I don’t . She hits some milestones exactly when I did, and others not so much. And that’s okay.
My kid is 11. Even when she was a baby I realized that motherhood was a long process of letting go, of accepting that:
a) She’s her own person, a complete individual with her own ideas, quirks and flaws, not just an offshoot of me
b) She’s not mine to keep; my job is to help her grow into a healthy, independent, functioning adult
Sometimes it’s hard to remember these things, but I always come back to them. Her flaws are not a reflection of my failures; it’s my job to help her recognize them, deal with them and ultimately accept them. This is easier to do with an 11-year-old than a toddler – at that age, you just love them and try to keep them from serious bodily harm as they careen around their surroundings.
I have a small daughter with a minor developmental difference that can have a big impact in certain contexts. It’s not a speech delay, but it is something that, like a speech delay, has a pretty significant impact on social interactions, her comfort, and people’s expectations for what a child her age will do when engaging with them. I, too, am not happy with the frequency and speed that I bring up my daughter’s difference with new people, but, at the same time, I can’t quite bring myself to stop doing it, as I’m worried that not mentioning it will either put her in an uncomfortable position or will make one of my friends or acquaintances say or do something that could be avoided if I had just spoken up.
I share Nicole’s discomfort with the author disclosing this information with her real name. But I don’t think she’s the worst. At least not for admitting that she’d like to change this behavior.
That’s…really unkind.
Look, I understand why the article is kind of gross, but everyone I know (myself included) who has a child who isn’t nuerotypical has had to explain to kind or nosey or angry strangers why their kid doesn’t talk (or throws themselves into walls or cover their ears and wail in loud public spaces).
“Sorry, he isn’t ignoring you, he just doesn’t talk.”
“Sorry my kid ran into your kid, he has autism and wasn’t being a jerk on purpose.”
Unless you’ve been there in the trenches, you simply don’t understand the terror of not knowing if your kid will be the worst case scenario. Never being able to communicate or use the toilet or go to school or live independently. Luckily, it sounds like her kid is starting to talk and is simply delayed. It took my son nearly four years and getting hit in the face with ‘severe, pervasive ” diagnoses wrings you out. I was a mess during that time. Have some compassion for this lady, is all. She’s probably a mess, too.
Preach.
SO MUCH THIS.
I agree with all of that. And while I was never any kind of overachiever, I come from a family where intellectual life is a delight and a refuge and how you pass your time in a world that often seems to value other stuff more highly, and having someone tell you your kid might never be of even average intelligence is confusing and difficult.
Furthermore you never know when your kid has some kind of suspected delay whether you are worrying too much or not enough, but you get rebuked in both directions.
That LearnedLeague post was awesome! I completely spaced on the starting date, thinking it was beginning Tuesday and not Monday, and FORFEITED for the first time ever. I’ve been in an LL shame spiral all week and haven’t won a single match.
That said, if you read that article and are interested in joining, let me know! I can get you a referral.
After Nicole posted about it back in June or July, someone here on The Toast was kind enough to give me a referral. So I’m in my rookie season right now, and I am SO PUMPED about it. I’m also getting my ass kicked by the toughest opponents. Right now my CAA is at 15, after 4 matches. 15! The next highest in my rundle is at 12.
ETA: omg, was it you that referred me and I sound like an ass? I’m sorry, that was so long ago in my mind, I can’t remember.
I totally referred you :P. In fairness, signing up for last season was so long ago in my mind that I spaced on the start date.
hahaha. I almost saved myself there. It suddenly flashed in my mind that it was likely you. Well anyway, I’m having a grand time!
My children would love it if I did this, because they are always trying to beat me at Trivia and so far never have. They would love seeing me get trounced
I would love a referral
hmm…I can’t set that up now, since referrals are closed at the moment. Once they’re back open, I’ll post in the open thread.
Please do! I am SO interested.
Seconded on the “please do!” I first learned about LL a few months ago when I was geeking out about Jeopardy! preparation stuff and thought it sounded awesome, but then I was stumped about how to get a referral without being super-annoying. Thanks for offering! (And sorry to be the, like, 10th person to ask.)
I want to join!
I am VERY interested.
I saw what you posted earlier re: referrals being closed right now, but when they open, I would be very interested in getting one. Yay trivia!
Hopefully other Toast LLers will be willing to refer as well – I get 1 per season.
oh my goodness i’m absolutely interested in joining – ken jennings’ tuesday trivia is NOT QUENCHING MY TRIVIA THIRST
I would love you forever, trivia is my favorite thing on Earth and I can’t watch Jeopardy anymore because I was on it and now I have weird freakouts every time I see the set. And I hate bar trivia because everyone names their teams after penises or weird sex acts and I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THAT.
If you are in a city where The Big Quiz Thing does trivia nights (so, Boston, Philly, or NYC, and maybe DC? Google them.), you should go to that. The crowd there is way less focused on coming up with the most disgusting team name and the questions are fun, not entirely arcane (they’re figureoutable, for the most part), and there’s audio/video involved. It’s completely ruined other trivia nights for me.
And based on responses, hopefully once LL registration is open again we can have some sort of thread where other Toast LLamas can help set everyone up with referrals so everyone can play defensive triva.
oh yes add me to the list of those clamoring for referrals!
Hi! I am 22 weeks too late, but I would love love love love love love love a referral.
Any chance I could get one?
You’re in luck! I have one for the upcoming season that starts in February. Shoot a message with your name/e-mail (what I need to sign up a referral) to ben [at] benMsmith [dot] com
Done!
I got 4 out of 8 questions right in the mini-quiz in the WaPo article! Finally, a real accomplishment. Actually 5, but it dinged me a point for mistakenly hyphenating Basquiat’s first & middle names. I feel like Nicole would let that one slide, though.
I got one wrong for putting “mules” instead of “mule” re: “what kind of shoes are these”.
I’m grumpy about it.
And I got one wrong for putting “dumpling” instead of “dumplings.” Hmmph.
That’s lame. I couldn’t remember his first name and just wrote ‘basquiat’ (un-capitalized) and they gave it to me.
I was very proud that I remembered Outkast is spelled with a K.
I was thinking about the “bloggin bout kids” thing recently, because I feel the first wave of really popular mommy blogs was what…10ish years ago? Some of whom are no longer active, I guess. But, so those 2-5 year olds are now teenagers who have the internet. Are they starting to find this stuff? If 13 year old me saw that all the gross, embarrassing shit I did as a younger child had been broadcast OVER THE INTERNET to strangers, I’d have gone full on Katie Ka-boom as demonstrated in this helpful video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvh_JAQdbWQ
I really hope some of the mommy blogger’s kids make bank writing tell all memoirs.
Yes to keeping your kids life semi private! I am all about not posting photos on social media until the kid can consent to it. I mean, not like I ask every single one of my friends before posting photos of them, but they are at least old enough to ask me to take one down if they don’t want it up (and I have complied when that’s happened).
What’s really interesting to me is the difference in approaches between friends my age (twenties) and friends/extended family my parents’ age (fifties). I, like you, will post pictures of my friends without asking them but take them down if they ask, which they rarely do. For older folks in my circle, that would be absolutely unacceptable. Any picture put online without their consent – even if it’s a flattering one – is an insult and a breach of trust. Obviously I respect that, and I understand it in theory, but it’s so different from the way I feel about photos that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around.
Oh my god though, my Aunt posts pictures of everyone all the time and comments on everything, and gets super offended if you ask her to stop.
Oh, yeah, I don’t think this is EVERYONE over (X age), it may be unique to this group of people.
My boyfriend’s relatives like and comment on every. single. picture. of him I post on Facebook, which started out cute and is now just the most obnoxious thing.
Ugh, this is my relatives to any pictures my boyfriend posts. I feel so bad but I also don’t know how to make them stop. Especially when both my mom and dad – who are divorced and don’t speak – comment on the same picture. Why people?
Definitely. Sometimes I think our generation is really specific. I don’t know about you but I remember getting the internet for the first time, and definitely remember the time before, so while it’s a huge part of my life and how I socialize, I also understand not oversharing. And I think on either side that gets to be an issue, either if you’re young enough that it’s always been in your life, or if you’re older and trying to incorporate it by mimicking what the younger people are doing.
A few years ago my husband and I went on a trip to Italy. He didn’t bother captioning most of the photos when uploading them to Facebook. One of his aunts was apparently really annoyed about this. She left a bunch of comments like “What is this? You should say what this is so people know!” and then when he didn’t, she left descriptive, allcaps comments on every single photo: “TREVI FOUNTAIN” “COLOSSEUM” “ST PETER’S” and so on. On the bright side, she probably learned a lot about Italy while doing the research necessary to caption all his photos for him!
That is so much effort!
That sounds hilarious and incredibly annoying.
My mother takes delight in posting the most AWFUL pictures of us and my cousins, thankfully mostly from before I was born or with me as an inoffensive baby, and tagging us in them.
I have the exact opposite thing happening in my family! I eventually had to have a little talk about internet privacy with my mom, and now she at least leaves me untagged. My parents are wayyy more into facebook and sharing than I am though.
Sort of parallel to Nicole’s point about the parenting writing, I was really, really appalled by the comments on that piece. Not that there wasn’t a ton to roll your eyes over, but people were ripping her apart for having used a sperm donor, being a single mom, all this misogynistic stuff.
I have a lot of questions and mixed feelings about whether writing stuff like this is worth it. Nicole’s right in that it can be valuable to other parents in similar situations, but then again, it exposes you to so much hate and criticism that I have a hard time imagining the pros outweighing the cons. I’m not trying to concern-troll, this is a choice writing parents can figure out for themselves, so maybe all I’m saying here is I couldn’t do it — I so rarely see an article about parenting where the responses don’t devolve into “You’re the worst mother in the world.” Like, as much as I love the Toast, I kind of don’t WANT that mythical Toast Mommyblog to exist, because I can’t even imagine a world of decent parenting writing.
Giving other human beings a forum in which to judge your parenting skills is a commenting nightmare waiting to happen. There are legions of human beings who will comment on your parenting skills, unasked, on the freaking sidewalk, so letting them do it anonymously online is… unwise.
Also, if 2 months of fatherhood have taught me anything, it’s that most single parents, especially single moms, must be goddamn superheroes. They catch so much shit, but they are performing Herculean labors every damn day.
The comments gave me hives. Being a (be-pseudonymed) parent in a similar situation to her, both expectation-wise and delay-wise. I appreciated the piece, and then read the comments and THEN WANTED TO KILL EVERYONE.
Things not to say to a parent whose child has been evaluated and who is coming to terms with delays and the ambiguity and uncertainty: “It’s probably nothing! Everyone’s overdiagnosed these days! Just give the kids time! They all come along at their own pace!”
*STAB STAB STAB STAB*
Do you think we don’t want that to be true? Do you think that, when we were trying to decide whether or not to make the various phone calls involved in those conversations we hadn’t already told ourselves that five hundred thousand times?
*breathing*
Anyhow, maybe, if you’re gonna write that kind of piece, do it in a place where the fucking comments are moderated and free speech is not valued. Along with the pseudonym thing.
*Runs away to drink wine and glower at the whole commenting world.*
That article is kind of the worst for gross ablist attitudes too, and it’s the dominant narrative about neurodiversity.
Could the Toast have a neurodiversity tab?
I like that word, neurodiversity. It’s new to me and fantastic! Thanks!
Yes, cosign!
(And it’s not quite the same thing, but Richard Dawkins recently said that if a woman found out that she was carrying a child with Downs Syndrome, she should “abort it and try again” (and that it was not Morally Correct to carry the child to term if you could help it), which made the smoke start to slowly leak out of my ears. It’s hardly the first time someone has made that argument, but gaaaaah: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-28879659)
What about a woman who finds out she’s carrying an insufferable, smug, racist, misogynist, rape apologist, mean-spirited, obtuse, brilliant-in-biology-but-absolutely-idiotic-in-every-other-field-of-human-knowledge garbage person? What should she do?
Oh yeah, I knew he was a jerk, but this just cements it even further.
I really like this idea, and I’d love to hear from neuro-atypical adults, particularly on parenting stuff. My middle child is on the autism spectrum, and I feel like most of the parenting advice out there for parents of neuro-atypical kids is from adults who are, like me, neurotypical. And not that some of that advice isn’t excellent, but I feel like the spectrum adults I’ve found have had a lot to say about how they’d like to have been parented and how they themselves parent, and I’ve found hearing from that perspective to be really useful. And I have a mess of rants about all of this, but I’ll save them!
Gah my county’s police union gave more than $1k to Darren Wilson’s gofundme.
Oof, the guy is on paid leave, the union is going to pick up his legal fees, what does he even need a gofundme for? How is this anything but a reward for shooting a black kid?
Their statement for the Baltimore Sun was: “It’s not about anything more than making sure that our fellow officer has due process, which sometimes is hard to come by when you have a media stir and a lot of political attention”
Which, whatever–it’s a fine sentiment I suppose, certainly much better than the majority of contributions, but presumably his own union is going to go to bat for him pretty hard AND the gofundme has more than $200k in it. He’ll be fine.
Anne Arundel? As a fellow Marylander, that made me really really angry.
Yep! I live in the city limits of Annapolis so my police are city police but STILL.
Another Annapolitan! (and another Marylander!) Not living there anymore, but YES to people to rage with. It’s disgusting that Anne Arundel police should have contributed at all, but the fact that theirs was the largest contribution just makes it even more terrible. ugh.
In goodbutactuallybad news, a couple of people have passed them up since.
I understand the purpose, but the words “police union” always sound like such an oxymoron to me. Isn’t their job kind of . . . to bust unions?
(I know, not all cops. BUT A LOT OF COPS.)
Amanda Hess has a piece in Slate that heavily references The Toast while also making the point that Bryan Goldberg is a total douche: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/20…
I think that Christopher Knight story is going to stay with me for a long time.
Oh my God Nicole (yes, God Nicole), or God Someone, please pretty please invite me to the Learned League!!!
This is basically all I want in life right now.
Did anyone else feel like the “white people talking over music” piece was… unfinished? Like, it was cool to have the history but it would have been great for her to talk about what it means. I’m willing to wager that rap-talk-singing as parody has seen a rise over the past 20 years because white people largely don’t see rap as a true art form, so it becomes something to play around with when you want to show you’re not serious. And how do you have an essay about rap-talk-singing without mentioning Kesha? I WANTED SO MUCH MORE.
It’s not rap talk-singing, but I didn’t see Rex Harrison mentioned anywhere in that article, and it is a travesty.
So I’m a pathological lurker and yet the correctness of this statement has forced my hand. In my family the proper term for this behavior has always been Rex Harrisoning. To Rex Harrison: a verb. Meaning: to talk on pitch in time with the melody to disguise one’s limitations as an actual singer. Sentence: Rex Harrison Rex Harrisoned his way through My Fair Lady and it was fine I guess, they still shouldn’t have dubbed Audrey. Or they could have just let Julie have the part.
It is basically my life’s work to make this a thing and have it end up on TV Tropes.
I did, too! I got to the end and thought, “Where’s the second page? Am I missing something? That’s-that’s it?”
I didn’t click on that one, and if it weren’t for your comment, I would have ended my week happily believing that it was a think-piece about white people having conversations while music was playing. Like, white people chatting during the jazz brunch, or pursuing whispered discussions during the middle school band concert.
That is actually what I thought it was going to be about, too! I was a little disappointed at first.
A lot of early Pet Shop Boys songs use some kind of “talk singing” but I don’t see it as parodic (even West End Girls), it would have been interesting to see what this meant in the 80s when rap of all kinds was still fairly new.
I also thought of CW McCall’s “Convoy,” which was a huge fucking hit in 1975, when white people had no idea what was going on at NYC block parties and couldn’t possibly owe its success to parody, intentional or otherwise. Which is to say, yeah — the article was kind of like “here’s a history!” and then quit before getting around to a history.
“Long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus,” hell to the yeah!
A lot of that early PSB talk-singing was definitely rap-influenced (West End Girls in particular), but in the sense that it was still thought of as another form of dance/disco music, and combined with to the more Brechtian talk-singing. And it was 1985 which I’d imagine gives it a different cultural context than “hey we’re making fun of this.”
Also! what about ’60s girl groups? “My Boyfriend’s Back”? “Leader of the Pack”?
Toast, here is a thing that a man just said to me and my female coworker:
“You women don’t know how lucky you are to not have to carry around a wallet in your back pocket.”
What is the best way to set him on fire please?
Sneak up behind him and set his wallet on fire.
I like the James Bond style Giant focused magnifying glass method of setting nemeses on fire, but I’m old-fashioned about that sort of thing
It’s about standards, really.
No fire; merely sew up all the pockets on his pants and make him feel the unending agony that is pants without pockets.
(this method of revenge may be motivated by overhearing my male coworkers lamenting their own pants-shopping struggles, foolish men you know nothing)
Someday when I have a lot of extra money I’m going to buy a regular pair of men’s jeans — you know, the kind that look like jeans a human would wear and not at all like a sausage casing and made of actual denim and not even very expensive — and take it to a tailor and have them fix the baggy crotch and the huge legs that result from me having to buy five sizes too big in men’s pants to fit my hips correctly. it will cost a billion dollars.
the other thing I think of sometimes is buying the jeans I usually do, buying a second pair of men’s jeans from the same brand, and taking them both to a tailor to do a pocket transplant. I have no idea if this is possible but if it is it would probably be cheaper than option A I bet.
you know what, there should be a movement among dirtbag teens to stop shoplifting lipsticks from the drugstore and instead, smuggle razor blades and men’s jeans into the women’s dressing room and liberate some pockets. then go to the roller rink or the malt shop or wherever dirtbags go these days and smoke some drugs and sew some pockets onto their dirtbag pants. teens, I give you this idea free of charge.
One time at a party I jumped in a pool fully clothed and one of the people there starting freaking out about my phone being in my pocket. Finally I told her my phone was in my purse b/c who has pants with big enough pockets to fit …. anything?
I’m holding out for the 90s-style carpenter pants to make a comeback: giant butt pockets, super wide leg and those weird side leg pockets.
I still dream about my Aeropostale carpenter jeans from 1996. So soft! So durable! So 100% cotton and free of spandex!
YOU AND ME BOTH.
I was camping two weekends ago and one of the guys had these AMAZING lived-in jeans with seam-to-seam rips at the knees and I wanted to steal them off his body. I have been dreaming about finding a pair like his ever since then.
teen dirtbags
jean dirtbags
Er, so you’re saying I shouldn’t be doing that, then? That is my default wallet location. Is that not where wallets go?
I never understood how anyone could possibly do that because it feels like begging to have it stolen since you can’t see it, it seems very vulnerable and strange to carry something on your ass, and also you would sit on it all day, so I always carried my wallet in my front left pocket and felt good about that. then it fell out and I lost it and now I realize it is I who am the foolish one.
You should put your wallet wheresoever you desire! Apparently it is a difficult thing for A Man to do. I only wish I had functional pockets so it would be an option for me.
However, if you are a person who has the wallet in your back pocket and you are having back problems, try not having it in your back pocket when you sit. The imbalance can really mess you up.
But yeah. That’s where they go. C’mon.
I am mystified how anyone can go through life with deliberately askew butt cheeks. How does that not annoy you constantly? And the back problems it must induce! There is no upside to this!
I also do this! When I am wearing pants with pockets anyway (stupid pocketless lady pants).
To those wondering how you fit a wallet in women’s pants pockets, I use the insert part of a “mens” wallet as mine. Patriarchal labels can’t tell me what to do! *kicks over wallet display*
Superglue all of his pants pockets shut or cut them off entirely. This may be hard to accomplish undetected, so bring a taser.
A flaming manbag hurled at his head would be the most ironic.
Does he know that he doesn’t have to carry it there, either?
I told him that and suggested several alternatives. TO MY CREDIT, “up your ass” was not one of them.
Impressed.
Deeply.
(heh)
My husband is a man and he carries his wallet in his front pocket.
Now, see, you’re throwing me off–I assumed there was some sort of Man Mandate (or ManMan Date, if you will) decreeing that all men must carry wallets in their back pocket. My worldview is shaken.
Attn: Men of The Toast (I know you’re out there): where do you carry your wallets? Why?
Front right pocket, ever since I started carrying a wallet. Back never made sense because A) I don’t want to sit on it and B) it can more easily get stolen.
My husband also carries his wallet in his front right pocket, for the same reasons you give.
Also, I found out not too long ago that prolonged sitting on your wallet means you sit unaligned and can cause sciatica and other back problems. Strike 3!
As does mine! Both for theft prevention and because who likes sitting with one buttock slightly above the other? That shit sounds uncomfortable.
Mine too. (Also, sometimes, my wallet, if I’m not carrying a bag. I have had to explain to him that the pockets on women’s jeans aren’t cut in such a way that you can put anything large in them. Men’s jeans have so much room!)
Or maybe he’s just happy to see you.
Yes! My gentleman friend does this too, because he is sensible.
I am also a man, got a Slimmy wallet and carry it in the right front.
Hit him with your overlarge purse that you are so lucky to carry, since you have miserable female-pocket options.
Unfuckingbelievable. Wow dude, it also must be nice that manufacturers make YOUR pants out of material that doesn’t wrinkle but don’t do the same for women because we all love ironing I guess and that you can actually buy pants according your leg length and that no one ever accuses you of wearing inappropriate clothes because standard sizes don’t fit you quite right.
It also must be so hard carrying around a wallet in your back pocket that contains more money than mine because you make more than I do for the same GD job and also it allows you to lean over and put your face in my non-work-appropriate boobs when you fish your wallet out of your back pocket to pull out your train pass after you already sat down.
RRRRRRRRRGGGGGH
TRUTH, TRUTH, ALL OF IT
Further evidence that I am a Dad and not a Hey Ladies-y lady: I totally carry a wallet in my back pocket. In the interest of trying to get a debutante do-over I’m going to start jamming it into my camel toe. Should be fun at the grocery store.
When I’m a man, I carry my wallet in my briefcase (where it normally lives; I used to carry it in a purse, but my sister decided to butch me up, and told me to trade the purse for a briefcase–I didn’t object as the briefcase was like an even bigger purse), or my jacket pocket, or sometimes even one of the front/side pockets of my pants (for those rare occasions when I have neither my briefcase nor a jacket, but need to have my wallet).
If I still had my old purse, I’d send it to you, so that you could craft it into a suitable incendiary.
If you don’t know the answer, get it wrong with FLAIR and VIM.
When I was a trivia host, I would advise my players, “if you can’t be right, be funny.” (if everyone got the question wrong, which rarely happened, I would give credit for the funniest answer)
You were a trivia host???? That’s so cool!
The host at my insanely competitive local trivia is a ridiculously nerdy, hilarious & brilliant little wisp of a man, and every time he talks to my team, my lady friends and I get all flushed and tongue-tied like we’re a bunch of teenagers meeting a hunky movie star or something.
All this trivia talk is making me miss my grad school trivia team 🙁
I know that writers rarely get to choose their deks (that’s the little quote that goes below the headline), so I’m hoping that this woman was not responsible for “I excel at everything I do. I assumed my daughter would too.”
I blame Slate for that one, and I suspect the writer is feeling “awwwwww fracking frack that makes me sound terrible but at least I got paid.”
Husbands, lovers, roommates, friends…anyone who borrows a car without asking?
In my world, borrowing a car without asking is referred to as grand theft auto, and should be prosecuted accordingly.
I cannot think of anything I own, or have ever owned, that is more expensive than my car. You need my permission just to touch the unwashed old thing.
When I started my blog I made an agreement with my kids: I would not write about them by name or talk about their struggles, because those were their stories really, not mine. That mother needs to go to re-education camp. She is so wrong in so many ways I could feel my blood pressure go up as I kept reading.
The hermit story. This statement is really about suicide, not death, but the end of a life:
“I drove until I was nearly out of gas. I took a small road. Then a small road off that small road. Then a trail off that.” He parked the car. He placed the keys in the center console. “I had a backpack and minimal stuff. I had no plans. I had no map. I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked away.”
I had no plans. It’s what you say, after a suicide attempt, when, inexplicably you wake up, still alive. You don’t know what to do, because you’ve put your affairs in order. You weren’t supposed to have to think about the future anymore. You weren’t to have to think about your job, the next meal, your friends, what your goals are. Suicide is supposed to take care of this. You wake up, and say to yourself, what do I do now? I have no plans.
When I read what he said, I was gut punched. I think this man was depressed, and he saved himself by “ending” his life. And I can understand that he didn’t, in reflecting upon his life and who he was, admit this to himself.
He also didn’t mention being alone, or lonely.
I can tell right now this story will have some resonance for me. The next time I’m in my bipolar-depression (in about 15 days), I may start to think of it as being in the northern woods, in the summer, and imagine that, at 2am, I’ll go to the lake, float on my back, and look up at the stars.
This is a really profound observation, and thank you for articulating it. I think this explains why reading this article this morning kicked my loneliness and despair and depression feelings way up, although I couldn’t say exactly why.
This was startlingly powerful. Thank you.
Thank you for this beautiful insight, and also for the warning that this is probably not a safe article for me to read right now.
It also must be noted that Comedy Central is streaming all of Season 1 of Broad City on their website! http://www.cc.com/shows/broad-city
BROAD CITY IS THE BEST
I expanded this reply specifically in order to post BROAD CITY IS THE BEST.
Oh my god that hermit piece. Fascinating in so many ways, but I can’t remember any of them because I read this and my brain stopped working:
“His first goal was to get fat. This was a life-or-death necessity. “I gorged myself on sugar and alcohol,” he said. “It’s the quickest way to gain weight, and I liked the inebriation.” The bottles he stole were signs of a man who’d never once, as he admitted, ordered a drink at a bar: Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy, Seagram’s Escapes Strawberry Daiquiri, something called Whipped Chocolate Valley Vines (from the label: “fine chocolate, whipped cream & red wine”).”
“Fine chocolate, whipped cream & red wine.” What vile, soulless monster came up with this abomination? And what misguided, self-loathing consumer BOUGHT IT?
Just reading that is making me a little queasy.
On the plus side, coffee brandy.
I have, in a fit of adventure, tried chocolate red wine. The reason it works is that there is so much chocolate that what little wine there is in there is completely buried. You are basically drinking chocolate milk with a slight kick to it.
Oh man that stuff is so, so gross. I had, like, a thimbleful of it a couple years back out of curiosity and UGH.
I am really, really curious about how the hermit is adjusting to life in a house with his eighty-something year old mom. I have a feeling we will never find out, though. I hope he is happy, can you imagine trying to re-integrate into society after almost 30 years of literally never seeing another human being? I worry.
Nicole, I agree with your stance. Mommy blogs bother me for this reason, even the ones who don’t necessarily divulge personal details (although SO MANY DO) but also the ones that just splash pics of their kids like, every single day. Especially the ones who monetize their blogs and earn money from their children’s lives, that makes me so uncomfortable. There was a reality show planned here in Germany about….high risk pregnancies, I think? It was scrapped because people thought filming the births would violate the privacy of the babies. I like this approach.
That hermit piece — I kind of hated it. I mean, I get that this is an interesting figure and a bizarre story, and Finkel was pretty sensitive and did a good job at neither romanticizing/idealizing nor condemning, but it still felt weirdly voyeuristic, especially for being about someone who wanted so much to be private: — “The best thing about being a hermit is not constantly performing your identity for the world.” –“So Mr. Hermit, can’t you just perform your role as hermit once and tell me something profound about life that you learned in your solitude?” UGH NO STOP MISSING THE POINT.
I thought that sort of was the point of that part–that the writer wanted him to impart some wisdom and that that desire was ultimately silly. I got a sense of ironic distance there between the author-of-then and the narrator-of-now. But maybe I’m projecting.
Totaly agree about missing the point. Knight had just made an amazing point about how the personality and the self fades away, and the author was still prompting him for some other magical truth.
Re: publicizing your child’s struggles/mental health problems on the internet, does anyone remember that “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” piece that was circulating after Sandy Hook? I still get sick to my stomach thinking about it, because a) the author wrote under her own name (meaning anyone wanting to figure out who her son is can probably do so in under five minutes of googling) and b) everyone was throwing it around on Facebook with comments like “ah yes! this is the problem! mentally ill people are very dangerous!” and it made me want to scream. Thanks for perpetuating the stigma AND calling your son a mass murderer, lady.
Julia Morgan!! *chin on hands, waits to talk* I love that her work is scattered throughout the state. She designed a few things in my hometown.
She designed Hearst Castle, which is one of my favorite California tourist traps. The pools. THE POOLS.
The pooooooooooooooooooooooools. Incredible. Honeymooned in Cambria this summer, and went to Hearst Castle. My husband’s uncle is buds with a park ranger that works there, so he took us around to see everything independent of a tour group and it was amazing. I had heard that there was an annual pool party for employees, so I breathlessly asked him what it was like. He just shrugged and said “eh, I swim in the pools whenever I want.” He works 24-hr shifts and has a little cabin on the grounds. After the park is closed, he just goes swimming if he wants. I have never wanted a job more badly in my life.
She designed the art museum in my hometown, where I spent alot of time. it’s a really nice building, and also used to be a YWCA.
I want into the LearnedLeague so badly now. MY PEOPLE.
“to quell their fears, the family renamed him ‘the hungry man'”
How did this quell anybody’s fears? “The Hungry Man” sounds infinitely more terrifying than “the hermit” — like something nightmarish that comes to get you if you don’t, I don’t know, finish all your peas or something.
25% *more* conservative than i am about online privacy? i guess it’s time to start looking into faraday cage cellphone cases then…
Why have I never heard of Learned League until now? I could have spent the last two decades cultivating the necessary acquaintances to get an invitation!
Many people believe that Mike Brown deserved death for maybe stealing cigars.
A white man steals from and terrorizes a town for decades and he gets 7 months in jail and a romantic feature in GQ.