RICH PEOPLE! (I mean…. what?)
Speaking of rich people, Pretty Woman turned 25 this week. It’s my favorite movie. Yes, it is. It is the best.
Here is some legislative bullshit from Indiana.
I’m too old to understand One Direction. I barely know what the group is. This isn’t a point of pride. There’s only so much room in my brain. That said, this is a lovely essay on One D over at Hobart. And here is one from Leesa Cross Smith about boy bands, oh boy bands.
Here are three amazing New Yorker essays:
Carmen Maria Machado on adjuncts.
Adjuncts are generally hired on semester-to-semester contracts, given no health insurance or retirement benefits, no office, no professional development, and few university resources. Compensation per course—including not just classroom hours but grading, reading, responding to student e-mails, and office hours—varies, but the median pay, according to a recent report, is twenty-seven hundred dollars. Many adjuncts teach at multiple universities, commuting between two or three schools in order to make ends meet, and are often unable to pursue their own academic or artistic work because of their schedules. In the past four decades, tenured and tenure-track positions have plummeted and adjunct instructor jobs have soared, second only in growth to administrators. Adjuncts have always had roles to play: filling in for a last-minute class, covering for a professor on sabbatical, providing outside expertise for a one-off, specialized course. But the position was not designed to provide nearly half of a school’s faculty or the majority of a person’s income. It’s estimated that adjuncts constitute more than forty per cent of all instructors at American colleges and universities.
Emily Nussbaum on the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
The credit sequence for “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is a variation on a familiar viral meme: an excitable trailer-park resident gets interviewed on local TV, only to have his words Auto-Tuned into a catchy jingle. The witness describes a bizarre rescue: four women emerge from a concealed bunker where they’ve been held captive for years by the “weird old white dude” next door—the leader of a doomsday cult. “Unbreakable!” the resident shouts, waving his arms, flooded with emotion. “They alive, dammit. Butfemales. Are strong as hell.”
Elizabeth Alexander on grieving the death of her husband.
The story begins on a beautiful April morning when a man wakes exhausted and returns to sleep in his thirteen-year-old son’s trundle bed, declaring, “This is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in!” Or it begins when the wife says goodbye to the man a few hours later, walking in front of his car switching her hips a bit, a kiss blown as she heads to her office and he continues on to his painting studio.
Bonus: opera drama realness.
As someone who travels a lot (too much), I am obsessed with Trip Advisor. I’m not alone.
The Koryo Hotel does pretty well on TripAdvisor, all things considered. The Internet never—and I mean never—works. The towels are “thin,” the sheet thread count low, and the milk powdered. Watch out for the “giant mutant cockroach snake hybrid“ in the shower. Guests even have to pay for the pool.
Still, the Koryo, a pair of dull beige towers connected near the top by a sky bridge, is the number-one-rated hotel on TripAdvisor for Pyongyang, North Korea. Despite its many faults, it garners three and a half out of five “bubbles,” in TripAdvisor parlance (so as not to be confused with the star systems that signify quality in hotels and restaurants), across nearly 90 reviews.
Is virtual fortune telling a thing? Maybe.
My fortune for the day says I’ll never understand selfies with the boys. I press a button and the machine produces another one: “you will make a new instagram mayb.”
Zach Gage’s latest app, #Fortune, is doing the prognostication for me. It culls strangers’ Tweets from the ether and regurgitates them as tiny fortunes. Sometimes they foretell heartbreak (this one says “You will PROBABLY MOST LIKELY cry for him”; this one says “you will make him a sandwich lol jk”). Other times, disaster (“You will make your life hell. Just a friendly reminder”). Here, the bot promises a querent that cuteness lies ahead.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill will be archived in the Library of Congress. I listen to this album on repeat, regularly. You should too.
Let’s go visit this bar in Los Angeles.
Can you imagine a castle carved into stone? I want to visit this so very much.
This place, in China, is also intriguing.
Are you a writer? Do you need a website? Jane Friedman offers a great primer on getting started.
How do you celebrate romantic anniversaries?
Tags: link roundup, the internet
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Also, Nicole adjudicated a fight between a zombie and 7 killings: http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/2015/zombie-rou…
Hah, comment twins! Glad to see I was not the only one obsessively refreshing both The Toast and TMN this morning.
yeah, this morning was like Christmas happening twice!
WHOA I did not know I needed Station Eleven in my life but I so do.
I just started it two days ago! Trying to make it last a little.
I started it last night. It’s really, really good.
HOORAY. I am very pleased with the results of her adjudication.
I have not been on The Toast much this week because when it’s Rooster time I can NOT SHUT UP in that commentariat. This is my favorite place to spent internet time 50 weeks of the year, but during the Rooster I have to jump ship and start very long involved arguments about the value of audiobooks and also whether or not I’m right (I am) about the books.
Nicole’s judgment for the Tournament of Books is up, and it is glorious as expected. http://www.themorningnews.org/tob/2015/zombie-rou…
I am terrible at celebrating romantic anniversaries, but luckily the boy is too – on our fifth anniversary (of getting together), we both accidentally made other plans.
This year – we’ll have been together for seven years this June – I’m trying to make plans, and I have a very very fancy bottle of wine waiting for it. But there’s also a work outing to the European Space Agency that day, so I may just ask the boy to celebrate either the weekend before or the weekend after… As I said: not good at romantic anniversaries.
Same. We’ve never been one for big celebrations. We’ll try to do a dinner, on or close to the date, but we don’t really do gifts or anything out of the ordinary. Idk why, it’s just never been that important to either of us.
My husband and I do the weekend before/after thing for many of our anniversaries! Its a beautiful idea to me, that you’re able to show appreciation for each other and your history, while still respecting schedules/weekdays.
Exactly! Plus, we’re not exactly sure the date we celebrate is the exact date we got together – it started as a casual thing, so it wasn’t until a few months later that we decided on an origin point.
Matt and I are gonna be in Paris for our first wedding anniversary and it was totally not planned that way and it’s sorta weird???
Also with anniversaries, how do you feel about other people wishing you a happy anniversary? I see this on Facebook a lot and am really weirded out by it, and also by the practice of getting cards from other people about your anniversary. It just seems slightly too intimate to have other people send you a card about? Why are they even keeping tabs on that?
I know a family whose grown children send cards and gifts in honor of the parents’ anniversary, and it always makes me feel awkward. Like, was I supposed to be doing that?
However, now that my mom is a widow I will call her on her wedding and engagement anniversaries, but that’s different.
I do this for my parents, and I’ve never found it weird? Usually just a card and some flowers/restaurant gift card. But also, I certainly don’t see it as mandatory. If it’s not your family’s m.o., no need to start now.
I do this too! I usually just send a card or some flowers. I think it would be odd to make a huge deal out of it because like Jaya said, it’s not exactly my holiday. However, with my parents, it feels fine to celebrate their happiness a bit. Now, if they started inviting me along on their anniversary vacations, that would be weird.
I always call my parents on their anniversary, but I agree with King Julien that it’s very much a what’s-your-family’s-style thing and not a universal You Should thing. It’s really kind to call your mom on her anniversaries, though — my extensive reading of advice columns tells me that that will mean a lot to her.
Same. I was super weirded out when I was on a trip with a friend and he bought a souvenir thing as a gift for his parents’ anniversary. I don’t think I even knew when my parents’ anniversary was until I was, like, in college. But my family is really private about romantic things.
My parents did send me a card for my first wedding anniversary, which I think is pretty understandable, but I bet they won’t for future ones.
We’re usually at the beach for my parents’ anniversary, so the tradition for the past few years is for me and my sister (and my brother if he’s there) to cook a fun, fancy dinner for everyone. We like to do it, and my parents love it, so it’s become a nice thing to look forward to every year. Before that, though, it was usually just cards and flowers or something.
I’m weirded out by the people who make elaborate protestations of love to their spouse on Faceboo for their anniversary. You live with the dude! Just tell him!
One of the reasons I am routinely glad the spouse isn’t on social media…
Ditto. It also means that when I’m stumped on gift ideas for him, I can ask around (or brag if I thought of a particularly neat one) without him knowing.
And what about acknowledging relatives’ wedding anniversaries? Because my step-father actually told me off last year because I’d forgotten to mention their 11th anniversary. Seriously. (Which prompted me quizzing all my friends, to see if they wished their parents a happy anniversary every year, and it doesn’t seem to be so much a thing! But in this case, as my step-dad snipped, his marrying my mom significantly elevated my quality of life, since it gave us leverage against my evil father, but I still really didn’t appreciate the suggestion that I’m ungrateful. Ugh. And of course I don’t think anyone should have to thank their biological parents for getting married and/or bringing them into existence.)
I bet that telling-off really made you grateful of him and his role in your life, and ensured you’d be eager to call him and express your affection and appreciation at every opportunity. (Is that how he saw this playing out?)
Heh, well, after getting it out of my system by bitching to all my friends, and talking about it with my mom, I marked it off as an idiosyncrasy and a difference in how we express affection/appreciation. For instance, I really like material gifts on birthdays/Christmas as a sign of love, and they’ve actually suggested forgoing all gifts in future, as they’ve apparently moved past materialism. But I hope we can strike a balance. If it means so much to him, sure I’ll acknowledge the anniversary.
This is one of those cases where even though I recognize that Love Languages is a little bit of a silly self-help framework, I buy it 100%. You are being very open-hearted and generous — I hope there are other people in your life who appreciate you in the ways that work for you!
Aw, thanks. While I have zero regrets about cutting off my aforementioned evil father, I do have increased appreciation for the importance of Family and making compromises in order to keep good relations with the people you value.
I am totally the person who sends her friends anniversary texts or cards. I have a good memory for dates, and I figure most people like having their happy moments acknowledged and celebrated by their friends. I also don’t see wedding anniversaries as particularly intimate, since me and 150 other people were there for the original ceremony.
I finished watching the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt this week, and wow. There is a lot to work with there, but also a lot that….doesn’t work at all. Buzzfeed’s article on it–about how it was one thing to joke about disgustingly rich people, but making fun of undocumented immigrants and deeply self-loathing Aboriginal people is punching down in a way that’s not as successful as it is just slightly tone-deaf. Now, I don’t think the show could succeed without that very bubbly effervescence that practically seeps out of every scene–but I’m just not as enamored with it as I was with Parks and Rec.
I’m pretty much done with the show, I think, because of the scene in the finale where Dong marries a classmate to stay in the US.
How fresh, original, and perfectly realistic. Yes, that’s exactly what immigrants do. Well spotted.
My husband is a Vietnamese immigrant and while he was unhappy about the prior episodes, that finale about blew his head office and he began ranting at length about how Tina Fey is a closet racist. There is….A lot of evidence for that.
I was perplexed about Dong’s undocumented status. How did he register for a GED class with no documentation? Isn’t that the sort of thing that would alert the authorities to your existence and location?
I feel similarly. I did watch it all in one sitting–that bubbly effervescence you describe was a much-needed antidote for me that week–and I enjoyed it, and found many things to admire about it. But there also so many things that feel wrong or off that I can’t see myself rewatching any of it as I’ve done with other comedies Parks and Rec and Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23.
Among the dealbreakers is that cringe comedy is just not my jam. Fish-out-of-water comedy, sure, but there’s a big difference between Kimmy bouncing back from minor missteps and Titus’s viral video. How could you do that to Titus, show. How could you.
I miss Don’t Trust The B like I would miss my own right hand if it were removed from me.
It holds up well to a re-watch! But yes, I wish there were more of it.
Cringe Comedy!!!! I have always hated, hated, HATED cringe comedy and never known a term for it, so when choosing movies with friends, I have always ended up with clunky explanations of what exactly I need to avoid in comedy, and I can never tell if I’m getting my point across. Thank you.
Yeah, this is why I stopped watching it. I absolutely loved the first two episodes, but I got to the very beginning of episode 3 and just…couldn’t do it anymore. SO MUCH CRINGE. Secondhand embarrassment is just not something I handle well and I couldn’t hack it. Kimmy is lovely and wonderful and perfect but there’s a lot (of both situations and characters) that are just handled so weirdly and racially and ???
I wanted to like it more, but I couldn’t.
Yeah, humiliation’s just not my thing. Poor Titus.
I’ve been rewatching both Parks & Rec and 30 Rock recently, and I think a real interesting contrast between them is that they’re both about professional women who are idealistic and trying to make it in this overwhelming and inhospitable world, but in Parks & Rec, even though Leslie Knope isn’t always successful, she’s always right to care about things and think that they matter, and in 30 Rock Liz Lemon is always wrong. 30 Rock is however many seasons of Jack Donaghy slowly convincing Liz Lemon to not care about anything outside of her own immediate success and well-being (often revealing anyone else who seems to care about things [with the exception of Al Gore] to be liars and fakes).
And Kimmy Schmidt has this similar sort of quality to me, in that it’s really admiring of Kimmy herself (and I think there’s a definite argument to be made about the need for women to be encouraged to engage in a kind of self-care and self-certainty), but seems very un-generous when it comes to everyone else. It’s sort of like the show’s moral position is that as long as its serious about Kimmy, it can take potshots at whoever else it wants to.
But one of the things that I like about 30 Rock (and why I rewatch it) is because much of the time, especially in the later seasons, Jack is just as often proven to be wrong in his cynical approach, and ends up reversing his advice to Liz and being happier for it. By the end of the series, Liz and Jack are both far less cynical and isolated as they were in the beginning of the series.
I would say that it’s far less sentimental than Parks, Parks would go for wacky over cynical obstacles for Leslie (which made it harder to see any legitimate obstacle to Leslie — in fact, my least favorite parts of Parks are where Leslie wins and hasn’t earned it, because she’s up against strawmen opponents/parodies and not real issues), and Liz definitely has a less functional support system than Leslie develops, but the main difference is that Liz is committing herself to a subpar TV show on a decaying network, and Leslie is committing herself to making the world a better place in a town inhabited by cartoons — of course Leslie’s commitment is rewarded and Liz’s is degraded. When Liz finds things/people worth committing to, she is right to care about them!
I would also say that Kimmy Schmidt is very supportive of women not being gaslit and abused — but that doesn’t mean that women are always automatically in the right. Jacqueline was set up for being crazy when she suspects her husband is cheating on her, and even says repeatedly, “I’m crazy for thinking this, right?” But even though her suspicions are justified, she still makes decisions that are subpar for her own well-being, because she prefers her comfort to the possibility of being alone. I think a lot of characters on UKS make bad decisions. That’s part of life, too.
Hm, I don’t know about that. What is a good example of Liz sticking to some principal or something in which she turns out to be vindicated?
(I’m not all the way back through yet, maybe it’s more common in in the later seasons, but I was just thinking about the finale of 30 Rock and that long speech she give to Tracy Jordan about how actually they’re kind of not really friends and they’re not really going to talk to each other any more. And friends is even pushing, to me, the boundary of “things outside myself I can care about” — her relationship happiness I think actually is well within that boundary.)
Oh, I don’t think Liz ever *sticks* to a position, as Liz is not someone who really has strong convictions, but it’s a really common trope that Liz is trying something and it’s not working, Jack tells her to reverse herself, and later in the episode Jack sticking to his initial cynical strategy doesn’t work at all and he ends up being more Lemon-like (or probably more likely, more Kenneth- or Tracy-like). The one where Jack pre-tapes a celebrity benefit, or when he decides to go get a vasectomy and ends up being all “kids are wonderful!”, are examples of this. I don’t think Liz is ever consistently proven to be right until the final season, though she gets growth on-and-off before that, but Liz isn’t really someone with strong principles to be upholding — her goals are always far more nebulous, and always much smaller, than Leslie’s.
I always interpreted that speech to Tracy Jordan as the end of their forced work/friend/boss relationship, which was always unstable due to the inherently uneven power dynamic (Tracy was Liz’s employee, but Liz had to constantly placate him), and the beginning of an actual stable friendship. Because unlike what she said in the speech, Liz actually DID call Tracy on his birthday in the epilogue — she had a phone reminder AND Jack called her to remind her — and then once she did call him, Tracy picked up and was happy to hear from her. Tracy and Jenna probably never spoke again once TGS wrapped up, because they had no true friendship, but Tracy and Liz, once they’d been open about the fact that their relationship had been a false relationship, could create a true friendship.
(I ended up stopping the series after the episode with Richard Kind as her GED teacher because — and this is obviously for very personal reasons, I’m not putting this up as general policy or anything — my wife is a teacher and I am not here for stories about lazy teachers who just want to fuck around and get tenure so they can get paid for doing nothing. I don’t care how many people like that exist in real life; if a person comes at me with a story like that, they’re on the Shit List in perpetuity.)
Me too. Which means I unfortunately have a lot of people on my Shit List.
I have to go to bed earlier and ealier every night, so that I have time to say all the names before I fall asleep.
PS I am sorry for making fun of Banana Republic yesterday.
I felt like it lost its nerve in the final three episodes and just disintegrated into quite hamfisted. Given that the show has been about Kimmy not wanting to be seen as a victim, it would have had more impact if the finale had resulted in both us and the other people in Kimmy’s life having to face the implications of her captivity more directly. That would have ‘pressed the reset button’ and set up the new challenge of not only how do you escape the place where everyone sees you as a victim, but how do you cope when those experiences are revealed? Going in that direction would have also made interesting opportunities for character development in Titus and Mrs Vorhees, who are both characterised by spectacular self-centredness. It would have been really challenging for the show to go somewhere that black, but I think by failing to do so they left themselves nowhere to go and just ended up with the offensive slapstick about immigrants and native peoples.
The parts of UKS I like, I utterly adore. I have a soft spot for just-barely-hidden darkness in comedy. I haven’t finished it yet – I’ve just been introduced to Dong – but my interest is declining. Wherever it touches on race – except Titus, who is amazing – it goes flat. I didn’t have a problem with Jaquelin’s Secret Native American storyline at first (because: dark humour) but what I’ve heard about how it’s handled later in is not encouraging. Even the theme song – I loved it at first, but every time I hear it it sounds less like a lampooning of the viral videos making fun of uneducated-sounding black speech, and more like an example.
Tina Fey’s feminism seems very much based on the idea that “equality means I can be just as much of an asshole as white men!” It is . . . not a form of empowerment I find much value in.
I am out of New Yorker articles for the month :((((
I am also an adult woman who unapologetically loves One Direction, though not to the degree that’s described. MrChouffe and I have certainly spent several evenings binge-watching 1D videos and have several of their songs on our wedding playlist, and if you have not seen the brilliance that is the Downton Abbey/1D mashup you, my friend, have not truly lived.
Anniversaries are a thing. We usually drink a good wine and ???
Corollary: I just sent that link to MrChouffe and his response was:
No, is too soon to Zayn Malik news. :'(
I love that man so much.
They were here in Atlanta the same night as Belle and Sebastian last October and I prided myself on being home loooong before the kids and their parents over at the Georgia Dome. The evident EVENTNESS and pumped-up kids in the area (the venues aren’t that far apart) was fun to see though, mostly because I wasn’t caught in the accompanying traffic.
And then I thought “fuck, they’re a STADIUM act?!?”
Also a friend told me the other day that it’s usually the start of a countdown. http://dlisted.com/2015/03/26/harry-styles-might-…
WHAT NO.
While very young she was there for Take That, I think she knows something.
While I am not an adult woman who loves 1D, I AM an adult woman who loves several kpop groups (some are girl groups, some are boy groups). So I found those articles very relatable.
That opera piece was fascinating! I went to my first opera a year or so ago, and I’m not sure it was entirely my cup of tea. Which is a bit odd because I dearly love musicals, but MAN was the show depressing. Maybe I’m just not as high-minded when it comes to culture as I thought. It just amazes me what these companies do to keep the art alive. Our city’s opera was supposed to shut down, but somehow they were able to bring it back from the brink after a huge public outcry..
I don’t know, I’m pretty into theater but I read that article and had some serious class outrage at the sheer expense of the spectacle of it all. Yes, absolutely, pay the musicians and singers very well, but spend hundreds of millions per season when inequality in NYC (not to mention America) is at an all-time high? This is just further reinforcement of the fact that the arts are for rich people, which is a damn shame. In conclusion, fuck the Met and support scrappy independent theater. Thank you.
They also employ a few thousand people, most of them New Yorkers, and a lot of the money they spend is middle class salaries for those people. And many of them (not only performers but also production crew and skilled artisans in the construction departments) won’t find comparable jobs if the met closes. If more audience will buy tickets for onstage horses (which god know I will), a lot of the bells and whistles make financial sense. Scrappy indie theater, where often people are donating their time and talent or working under very exploitative conditions, has its own problematic financial model.
The Lepage Ring was an abomination though. No excusing that.
But didn’t opera begin as entertainment for the unwashed masses? Fight scenes, bawdy jokes.
There was full nudity in the staging of Salome that I attended a few years ago. I enjoyed it very much.
Bawdy and raucous, yes, but not necessarily for the unwashed masses–opera houses are often designed so that all the gorgeously dressed patrons can gawk at each other. Though I don’t know how often they bathed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so maybe they were unwashed.
Well, not exactly. Opera definitely had popular periods, but it started out as an attempt by wealthy Italian nobles to revive classical Greek drama . Opera as broad public entertainment was, like, step two in its history.
(Still this is a salient point, it’s not like it was exclusively the province of the bourgeoisie.)
Reviving Greek drama. That’s the info I needed. Thank you. Finally, someone takes my questions seriously. I am here to learn. OK, I’m also here to proclaim my opinions. Just not exclusively.
I am sometimes embarrassingly eager to jump in and start talking about the history of theater, so.
and that’s the sort of thing that makes the toast such an amazing place to hang out. smart people leaking smart thoughts all over the place. i learn about so many varied topics here that otherwise wouldn’t come up in my life. THANK YOU!
You guys, I know I should wait for the open thread, but can we talk for a little bit about the Germanwings investigation? Was listening to NPR this morning and they kept asking if the pilot had symptoms of depression, which as far as I know based on my own experience DOES NOT TURN YOU INTO A MURDERER.
Also my fiancee kept saying “well people who commit suicide are selfish” and that actually did almost turn me into a murderer. He is wonderful in so many ways but he is just not very analytical when it comes to anything that is happening inside anyone’s head, including his own.
UGH YES. This is so, so worrying to me–like, I get that it’s very difficult to wrap your head around depression or suicidal thoughts if you’ve never had them, because they don’t make sense, BUT ffs you could…try? You could listen to people who have had that experience? You could not leap to “depressed people are dangerous” when there are freaking MILLIONS of us?
I would really like to change the wording for “killed herself” or “committed suicide,” because those imply rational, premeditated acts, and no, victims of suicide die of disease. You can’t be “selfish” when your selfhood is drowned in depression.
ugh ugh ugh
Extremely late to this, but re: wording my boss recently used “lost his brother to suicide” for someone, which I though was fairly sensitive phrasing. I’ve also heard “died by suicide” which I’ve tried to keep in mind. (I agree with you 100%, if you couldn’t tell)
UGH sucks that your fiance thinks that way 🙁
The coverage I’ve read focused more on how he was apparently hiding an illness from his employer/coworkers and his doctor had written him a sick note for teh day of the flight but he tore it up and flew anyway. Regardless of what the illness was, clearly his doctor didn’t think he should have been flying that day…
I’ve heard that too but the one reporter I was listening to kept asking the pilot’s acquaintances “did he seem depressed? do you know if he had problems with depression?” I just feel like this is going to set back people’s understanding of depression even further.
ugh okay so the more I looked into it the more gross coverage I did find. But this Guardian article made me feel a bit better.
Yes, yes, yes. I keep seeing the “He had DEPRESSION! PSYCHIATRIC ISSUES! CRAZY DUDE INCOMING!” articles and thinking, good God, are people going to be looking at us like potential mass murderers now?
:/
This came up over coffee this morning at home and ugh ugh ugh. Yes, public shaming of chronic depression and blaming it for a mass murder is really really going to help out with people being scared to ask for help. UGH.
Even more awesome, a friend just shared an article from some dodgy ‘natural health’ site speculating that in fact it was all caused by the pilot taking SSRIs and having delusions. So don’t just demonise people with depression, ALSO demonise a whole tranche of treatment options. GRRRRR.
You can take my SSRI out of my cold, dead hands (which would be a likely scenario if I were deprived of my SSRI). Everything is terrible etc.
If anything, this only helps contribute to the problem where, in some fields, people are already actively hiding mental illness/not seeking full treatment because they’re afraid they’ll be deemed unfit to do their jobs. Blergh.
They already do. Remember the Virginia Tech shootings? Afterward there was a huge push for colleges to be more involved in monitoring students’ mental health, which I always found problematic from a privacy/HIPAA standpoint.
My normal ways of processing tragedies do not work here. It’s really upsetting.
i have two semi coherent thoughts about this that keep returning under the shouty “That’s Not The Conversation We Need To Be Having About Mental Health” one which are:
a) remembering the bus driver from veronica mars and how they tried to frame him for the crash
b) marveling at the cognitive dissonance of clawing to be the first to require mental health assessments for pilots, but not for gun owners…
I am just worried there are going to be mental health assessments for cars next.
If he was Muslim or a POC, we’d be hearing about the cultural/religious beliefs that allegedly caused this, but this is a white dude and as we’ve learned, whiteness oughtn’t ever be tied to any kind of violence no no look the other way! When straight white men do bad things mental illness is the only fallback the media has to explain their actions and without an explicit diagnosis they’re offering the weakest possible speculation.
I’m awful at romantic anniversaries. My husband and I have been together for 6 or 7 (maybe even 8?) years now, but the beginning was so messy that it’s hard to pinpoint a day to celebrate. So we just don’t. And then people give him grief for not knowing how long we’ve been together until they realize that I don’t really know either. But this year we do actually have a wedding anniversary to celebrate! And we made plans with a big group of friends before we really realized it was our anniversary. Ah well. Maybe next year.
Hands up if the numbers in the first article made you feel like this:
My last serious boyfriend was a) kind of a jerkwad and b) not into “numbers” (or, for the first year or so we dated, even telling people that we were dating/that he loved me, well, ever) so I got completely warped against the idea of anniversaries, because the dates on the calendar passed and nothing happened as a result.
Writing it out really helps me realize how fucked up the whole situation was!!! Lord. No wonder I’m having trouble now. What a chode he was.
Yup, that is exactly how I felt. $14 million dollars? I thought my house was expensive. And their condo is probably as big as my house which is terrifying.
a 12-room spread with a hot tub and private 37-by-15-foot outdoor pool
that’s… 555 square feet. That’s like 100 square feet more than the first apartment my husband and I lived in. *weeps*
Those kids need Pappy Tenenbaum ASAP.
My best (only) One Direction story: Boyfriend and I were on a train to the city and I noticed that the ridership of the train skewed pretty heavily teen/preteen girl but I didn’t think anything of it. Until the train got to the city and all of those girls started screaming when we rode past the stadium. I had a lightbulb moment and told boyfriend there must be a 1D concert tonight but he had no idea who they were. I said “It’s okay, you’re old and male so you don’t have to know who they are.” The super sassy 14yrold in front of us turned around and said “Actually, it’s not okay.”
That 14yo will go far in life, i like her.
I am really enjoying the romantic anniversaries question, especially since it seems like a number of Toastpeople are in long-term relationships but don’t care too much about dates and numbers. I like it.
I am a nonmonogamous and not terribly romantic person, but I do like celebrating things, so I celebrated a kind of anniversary with a gentleman and good friend I’ve been dating on and off for three years. (How’d that happen?) Hilariously, we first met around Valentine’s Day, so there we were in mid February doing an elaborate dinner like a romantic couple. Neither of us are making much money right now, so we cooked at home. I asked him to make a sort of time-consuming dish, and I made salad and dessert, and popped some popcorn to munch while the main dish was cooking. And I had a bowl of mixed nuts on the counter. “Do you think this counts as a five-course meal?” he asked. Sure, if you count the nuts. And we drank a lot of wine and watched a movie.
So that is how nonmonogamous people on a budget do the anniversary of their first date!
Aw, I hope the kid from One Direction can take a breath and be a normal person for a little while. I feel like being that crazy famous would be MISERABLE…
I’m just going to rock back and forth on the floor holding my dogs and weeping, fearing early widowhood via murderous pilot action. Fuck men.
My fiance and I weren’t entirely sure when to mark our first year of couplehood, so we just decided to start counting from our wedding date, making last October our -1st anniversary. We stayed in, made pasta, and drank wine. It was lovely. He’s also really terrible with remembering dates, so we’re getting married on his mom’s birthday because it’s one he’s confident he can remember.
Ted Leo’s birthday is September 11 and then he went and got married on the same date. “Fuck you, it’s MINE.”
“the parents weren’t looking for an apartment, great or not, until the children clued them in to the possibilities.”
Yes, that’s one way to put it, Veruca dear.
Thank you for linking Elizabeth Alexander’s story on grief. That was so powerful it actually fought through my effexor and made me cry real tears.
I just preordered her new book.
so good.
off-topic, but I’m currently tapering off of cipralex and onto effexor – any info on how it’s worked for you would be awesome, if you feel like sharing. If not, and this is waaaay too personal, sorry!
Oh my goodness not too personal at all. This is the Toast, I love you all. Effexor is good stuff. I’ve been on it for so long (150 mg a day for….forever? Nearly six years-since my kid was born). It definitely keeps “things” manageable. If that makes sense. Do I still get depressed? Of course. Anxious? Duh. Panic Attacks? Obviously. BUT i can’t work though them. I can keep going. And there is less of it. And it really does seem to keep me from crying real tears. That was true. Which for me is a big deal because I tend to cry over everything.
One thing is they are strong and withdrawl is dibilitating. There was actually a character in Station 11 (to bring it back to link roundup) who needed some post apocalypse and she broke my heart. BROKE it. So you can’t fuck around with it.
I hope this helps and I hope effexor helps you as much as it has helped me. I have been through sooo fucking much and can’t imagine doing as well as I have without its help.
Also msg me ([email protected]) if you ever want to talk about it…
Thank you! The cipralex had been fine for years, although my dose has stepped up twice since I started on it about 3.5 years ago. But recently my mood was still pretty steady, but it basically quit doing anything for anxiety. And the side effects were starting to bother me – super drowsy a lot of the time (and I cannot remember to take it when I tried to switch to taking it at night), and the whole anorgasmia thing is intensely annoying.
It looks like those are maybe slightly less prevalent with the effexor, so that’s nice.
Thanks for all the info! Toast folks are the best!
That piece was beautiful.
Well, not exactly. Opera definitely had popular periods, but it started out as an attempt by wealthy Italian nobles to revive classical Greek drama . Opera as broad public entertainment was, like, step two in its history.
(Still this is a salient point, it's not like it was exclusively the province of the bourgeoisie.)
Our city orchestra went belly up on December – wages and rent unpaid, concerts cancelled, no ticket refunds, total disaster.
We celebrate our wedding anniversary and also the anniversary of when we started dating (which, by a fun coincidence, is also my parents’ wedding anniversary) because why would I pass up the opportunity for twice the celebrating? We usually go out for a fancy dinner. Sometimes there are presents, but occasionally we skip those because my husband is really hard to shop for (he just doesn’t want things like I do so I end up getting him a dress shirt because he needs one and that’s obviously not as fun) and I feel weird if I’m the only one getting a gift.
I’m keeping the dating anniversary too. I also really like the excuse for two fancy dinners instead of just one. Plus also, while the wedding anniversary will be some random boring date, the dating anniversary is 9/11/11. NEVER FORGET (which I did, the first time). I have no memory and no class.
ugh okay so the more I looked into it the more gross coverage I did find. But this Guardian article made me feel a bit better.
When one Upper West Side woman began looking at apartments, her architecture-mad 10-year-old son “starting injecting himself into the process,” she said. “He found StreetEasy and then he started looking up where our friends live and he’d say, ‘You wouldn’t believe what so-and-so paid for their co-ops.’ I shut that down right away and told him he could only search the architects of the buildings his friends lived in.”
RICH PEOPLE, indeed
Oh I kind of love anniversaries. We never make a big deal of them, but we do always do something, and my husband always gets me a sweet card and I always totally forget to get him a card. I purposely got married in November because our dating anniversary is in October and I wanted to keep it in the fall. Fall is just the most romantic season, right?
Also this May 5, we are celebrating our first engagement anniversary AND me starting my third trimester! That seems like a legitimate reason to celebrate an engagement.
Aww, congrats! My husband and I have gone out (or ordered in) sushi for pretty much every wedding/engagement anniversary, but this year I was five months pregnant so we ordered Chinese and watched movies. He bought me what he thinks my favorite chocolate is (which is a kind of chocolate he doesn’t eat, so I get it when I don’t want to share), and I bought him chocolate that we both like.
MrKat and I have to pull the marriage license out of the filing cabinet to remember the exact date when we got married. There’s the date of the actual marriage at the Brooklyn courthouse, the date of our dinner-party-reception six months after, the date we told his mom we eloped and the date she started talking to us again. Of course, our reception/husband’s birthday was ruined (? I hesitate to say that, because it sounds like I mean: Oh boo hoo my big day was ruined! When, really, I mean fucking tragedies ruin things) by his younger brother’s suicide a few days before, and his grandmother died on my birthday a few years after that, so, you know. We don’t do a whole lot of celebrating.
I have always suspected, but am now firmly convinced, that all non-straight-news sections of the NYTImes are fabricated stories that are made up in a deliberate attempt to foment a class war.
I’ve always known really, but there is just no way that “Skye van Merkensteijn” is a real person. THERE IS NO WAY.
That’s a “Gossip Girl”-level rich-person name.
Incidentally, one of my favorites things about that show is that if you jumbled up the names of the actors and the names of the characters, it’s reallllly hard to know which are real and which are made up.
““Would it be more helpful for them to take out the garbage?” Dr. Saltz asked. “Maybe, but it’s not as much fun.” Anyways our nanny has so much fun with the trash we didn’t want to take that away from her.
Ho ho ho no way we can afford a $14 million apartment PSYCH yes we can.
Speaking of the MET, the MET Orchestra’s blog is great.
I am actually boarding a plane to Seattle right now for a weekend trip to mark my first wedding anniversary! So I guess that is how I celebrate.
My partner has serious gift giving anxiety, which translates often into frustration and then anger in the whole stupid consumerist thing, so we eschew gifts pretty much on the whole. Usually there’s a nice meal involved, but that can be at home or out depending on our moods.
For our first wedding anniversary, we had some of our saved wedding cake and opened up a nice bottle of bourbon we’d been saving for the occasion. Pretty ideal, if you ask me.
Valentine’s Day is wholly ignored.
Valentine’s Day is actively avoided in my house. Not sure why. It just seems … useless.
My anniversary is in mid-July so I am almost always travelling to or from some vacation place. It does not matter what day of the week the anniversary is on, somehow it ends up as a travel date and we’re on a train, plane, or spending the day in a car. For our five-year anniversary we were actually at home so we went out to a cheese bistro for lots of fancy cheese, charcuterie, olives, bread, and so much wine. It was absolutely wonderful. Far better than 5 hours on a train starting at 4 am or 8 hours of flights/waiting in the airport for flights.
I have been puzzling over the anniversary question this morning. Our first wedding anniversary was last October and I can’t for the life of me remember what we did for it. Granted, the date chosen didn’t have any particular significance to us–it’s just when the first judge who answered the phone when we started calling around had free. Romantic, no?
We eloped (to a registered partnership, not a marriage, but it’s legally pretty much the same) and it was… sometime last August? On a Monday, because that’s when we could do it cheaply in 5 minutes, so I could probably look it up. Needless to say, that’s not an anniversary we’re going to celebrate.
We’d probably have gotten domestic partnered here if that had been an option, but the reason we got married instead of shacking up indefinitely and blissfully was that I needed health insurance and his workplace would not extend coverage to opposite-sex domestic partners. For reals. I wonder how that policy has changed now that the state we’re in has passed full marriage equality. The logic seems to have been “if you’re legally allowed to get married, you have to do it for the sweet sweet healthcare.”
Oh, America.
In the Netherlands it was created as a “separate but not quite equal” thing before full marriage equality was passed, but it’s legally almost exactly the same now (it’s slightly easier to dissolve), with the perk that there are fewer social expectations attached – and also, I just don’t know if I’ll ever feel like a “wife”. Our very practical reason for it was that we bought a house. I’m very happy healthcare is not connected to work here!
I just don’t know if I’ll ever feel like a “wife”
I’m surprised at how well I’ve gotten used to it, actually. In a better-organized society, being able to refer to “my wife” or “my husband” wouldn’t have to confer instant social legitimacy as an adult, but…it really does, and we’ve both noticed that we get taken more seriously here because of it. I’ve always been a little sentimental about the whole thing, and I wanted to get married anyway, but he was less conventional in that respect than I was, and registered domestic partnership would have been such a nice middle ground, but hey.
And yeah, in a better-organized society, I also wouldn’t have had to get married for health insurance.
I was really hoping that the opera fights article was going to be some Russian-ballet-level shit about people throwing acid in each other’s faces.
A girl can dream.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gwiInUNf_s
This isn’t really about anniversaries but about wedding gifts – apparently it is tradition for the bride and groom to get each other gifts? Wait, we are already spending an astronomical amount of money on a wedding, and we have to buy each other something? Also, my fiancee has said that for our wedding he wants to get me … a computer. Not as unromantic as pots and pans perhaps (that was his father’s first Christmas gift to his mother) but… no. I told him I didn’t want a gift… And I really don’t want a gift unless he can come up with something slightly more romantic! I told him to ask his men friends what they got for their wives. I am being really complain-y about him today, I guess, and really he is a wonderful man, but he does not have a romantic bone in his body.
I thought the rings were the gifts. That’s how we did it anyway
That’s how I feel. There is no need for additional, excessive gifts!
Aw, yeah, there’s a whole series of different kinds of gifts you’re supposed to get depending on what anniversary it is. Like, year one is paper, year two is cotton, year three is leather, 25 is silver, 50 is gold &c.
I am not sure what leather was, traditionally, I assume it’s not like BDSM gear but who knows with the Victorians.
I actually had friends who for their first (paper) anniversary, the husband wrote the wife a check to pay off her student loans. That is the kind of practical gift I can get behind, because (a) it was very thoughtful, (b) took a lot of stress out of her life, and (c) wasn’t something she would do herself (or have been able to do, really). I guess that’s the thing about the computer. Like, I am going to buy a new computer ANYWAY because my current one is 7 years old (YAY APPLE) but I want a gift to be something that I wouldn’t buy for myself.
My in laws got us a paper anniversary gift, and it was like two months’ worth of toilet paper and paper towels and you know what? That is a good gift.
I’m stealing this idea for my upcoming 1st anniversary. You can never have too many paper towels or toilet paper. Maybe I’ll even spring for the fancy stuff
We just made some of the wedding stuff our gifts to each other: I bought his suit and he bought our rings.
My husband made me a knife for a wedding present. As in, borrowed a friend’s forge and expert advice and made it. I’m sure I did something for him, but I don’t remember what now.
On anniversaries, though, we don’t tend to do presents. A nice dinner or a joint trip to a bookstore, sure, but otherwise it just feels like buying our own presents because we keep all our money in common.
Mr. Smith (first name: John, middle name: No Kidding) and I celebrate our wedding anniversary – well anniversaries…
We were married officially in the local courthouse before we drove up to have our quasi-religious (and tiny) ceremony for family a couple of days later. At first, he was more inclined to think of the unofficial date as the “official” one, whereas I was more in the other direction. Now I think we both kind of like that we have an anniversary that’s really “ours” and one that other people might wish us happy on if they remember/care. Mostly we do boring stuff like going out to dinner. Occasionally we give each other straight-up sexy, expensive gifts like a Nest thermometer because it’s something the house needs and the rationalization for purchase is there for the taking. We’re both librarians, so we’re ever so fancy that way.
Are your innuendos LC or Dewey?
Nicely played.
We’re academics, so if we did classification innuendo it would have to be LC. Somehow I can’t get worked up over, “Hey baby: HQ 12-449!” though.
I do have a printout of 348 from this site on my office door, though: http://phette.net/projects/doge-decimal-classific…
I just assumed librarian couples would do as one of my aunts did: She and her husband buy themselves another shelving unit for each anniversary. So many books, never enough shelf space.
Nah – we BORROW books for the most part!
None of my stuff is in order. One of my exes is a cataloger but left to my own devices I just try to make it all fit somewhere. Apparently I need Parker Posey to come in and get me organized. (I’m not saying I don’t feel guilty)
We now celebrate our wedding anniversary– but as he’s a freelance set designer, he’s often away for our actual anniversary. The last two years he was in DC, so I just hopped on a train and spent the weekend with him. We went out for dinner, but then he went back to work. There was hotel room sex, though!
“My cousin Anabella is almost 16. She’s into musical theatre. She posts pictures of froyo on her Instagram has four times more followers than me. Her favorite member of One Direction is Niall.
I’m almost 25. I’m into cheap wine and Harry Potter fanfiction. I work three part time jobs. I file my own taxes. I am an adult woman. My favorite member of One Direction is also Niall.”
wow, I’m pretty sure this author and I are the same person. We have (almost) the same name, the same teenage cousin, the same favorite member, and we’re the same age…
On a serious note, I have a friend from college who spiraled into a really, really deep depression after we graduated. I’ve barely seen her since then, although we’re less than two hours’ drive apart. She’s withdrawn from me + all of our friends almost completely since she had to move back home. Talking about One Direction is literally the only time she will respond to my texts. Her obsession has far outstripped my own at this point, but I’m really glad that I got her into them, because being able to talk to her about them is the only way I can check in and make sure she’s still alive, even if she hasn’t gotten out of the hole she’s in.
Idk how badly Zayn leaving will affect the band, and I don’t know how it’ll affect me and her, and I’m more worried than sad- at the moment. But it is something that I Care About, and I appreciate all of the good essays/articles that have been written in defense of caring about this thing.
Our wedding was mostly family and very small. We’d just moved after college, so asking friends to spring for tickets/travel to my hometown 4 hours from a major airport seemed like a major impostition. To make up for it, we’re celebrating our anniversary with friends this year. I like a theme (the better for puntastic names for the appetizers and drinks), so we’re doing a James Bond cocktail party. I’m going to dress the dog as Honey Rider and I think Mr and I will do Quantum of Solace.
““They choose where they and their parents are going to have dinner or where they’re going to go on vacation,” said Stuart Moss, an associate broker at Corcoran. “So why shouldn’t it extend to where they’re going to spend several million dollars for a residence?”
““THEY CHOOSE WHERE THEY AND THEIR PARENTS ARE GOING TO HAVE DINNER OR WHERE THEY’RE GOING TO GO ON VACATION,” SAID STUART MOSS, AN ASSOCIATE BROKER AT CORCORAN. “SO WHY SHOULDN’T IT EXTEND TO WHERE THEY’RE GOING TO SPEND SEVERAL MILLION DOLLARS FOR A RESIDENCE?”
oO
Yeah I’m not sure why but that was the thing that got to me, also. Like, either (i) your lives are so controlled by your kids that you let them make all the decisions, or (ii) you are so busy that you delegate all important decisions in life to your kids and hence (i).
I don’t understand why we’re talking about New Yorker articles and not mentioning the Lena Dunham atrocity where she compares her dog to her Jewish Boyfriend (the Judaism being essential to her thesis).
Oh my god that was some horrible nonsense, wasn’t it
Nonsense is such an understatement! It was awful and anti-Semitic and I am almost more upset that people aren’t just finally fucking closing the door on her. Who signed off on it? It was the furthest possible thing from funny.
If it makes you feel better, this is the first link that comes up when I search her name: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/03/27/l…
The New Yorker is defending it as self-deprecating comedy, which has a rich tradition, yes, but this did not read to me like self-deprecating comedy at all. I was actually searching her to find out if she’s Jewish, which I realized is irrelevant – if I couldn’t tell from the piece, then it’s not self-deprecating. And above all, it’s a tired, mean, and frankly boring joke.
My wife and I have straight-up forgotten our anniversaries until the day of on multiple occasions — but last year we got married on our “half-iversary” (we started dating June 23rd, married on December 23rd). It was really neat because despite both being pagan, we both luuuuuuurve Christmas, so as soon as we got marriage equality in our state (just before Thanksgiving) we decorated the house to the nines, turned on the Christmas music, and started crafting Christmassy announcements as surprise gifts for family. And we got dresses that looked like seven-year-old Christmas party dresses with the floof and the sashes — hers red, mine green — and wore silly little hats to have our apartment manager (a notary public) marry us in front of the charity-gift tree in the office. We made her call it our six-and-a-half-iversary party.
This is much less sweet when you realize that the June 23rd date marks the first time we fucked. We had the classic bisexual “Is this a date, or just coffee?” problem, so when we started dating is considerably more up in the air than when we first did the nasty, so that’s what we mark our relationship by.
No YOU wrote a comment just to vapidly report on your girly wedding stuff
I’ll never understand how the usually awesome contributors on this site are always so all fired up that “sex work” is great, awesome, super, empowerful fun. It really, really isn’t. And Pretty Woman is an incredibly awful apology for it. http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/03/23/pre…
One of the things that I love about The Toast is how the contributors neither fully glamorize nor fully demonize sex work. I’ve always found The Toast to be one of the few places where you can see a full range of opinions from actual sex workers.
On that note, I want to signal-boost this great piece by Toast contributor Anna Pulley on Pretty Woman: What ‘Pretty Woman’ says about sex, money, and how we view women.
That article made my blood boil. It’s infantalizing. condescending, and patronizing to the extreme. It assumes that no grown woman could ever choose any form of sex work willingly and must have been abused or pimped.
“The film suggests that prostituted people are knowledgeable and have other options they might have chosen.” Many are, and it’s presumptuous to speak for all women in the industry with that kind of broad declaration. It’s a more nuanced experience for a lot of women. http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/15/technology/silico…
Maybe this author should read something by some actual sex workers, who will tell you that a lot of the laws and stigma surrounding their jobs actually do more harm than good. Mistress Matisse from Seattle (of the Stranger) does a lot of very interesting activism work to and could hardly be called a victim by anyone’s standards. I recommend checking out her work on the subject for a different take from someone who has actually been there.
This is not a black and white issue. For many people, it’s just a job. Of course it is not a universally positive experience and can absolutely be harmful and exploitative. But rather than penalizing or patronizing women, a better solution would be to decriminalize the work and regulate it so there would be safety standards and support.
That said, I hate Pretty Woman because I think it is a gross movie about a woman who needs a man to save her. I don’t think it glamorizes prostitution as much as marrying rich to solve your problems.
The film suggests that prostituted people are knowledgeable…
The audacity!
I don’t think it glamorizes prostitution as much as marrying rich to solve your problems. +++++++++++++
I just think the movie is a lot of fun and Julia Roberts is pretty.
I do love the shopping scene. I wish someone would hand me a credit card so I could dress down a snooty shopkeeper too!
I just think the movie is a lot of fun and Julia Roberts is pretty.
PIneapple pie! Why have I never heard of this amazing food before? Do you have a shareable recipe?
Yes, on my food blog, because I am trash: http://pearnuallak.com/food/2015/02/21/pineapple-…
I'd very much recommend First Prize Pies by Allison Kave if pies are your thing!
My Irish friends are embarrassed about Niall Horan, and have it on good authority that he once shat in an oven.
Wait, how would that even work?
CINNAMON CUSTARD POTS
I love you forever now.
Kids these days.
“They choose where they and their parents are going to have dinner or where they’re going to go on vacation,” said Stuart Moss, an associate broker at Corcoran. “So why shouldn’t it extend to where they’re going to spend several million dollars for a residence?”
WHAT KIDS GET TO DECIDE WHERE TO EAT AND VACATION? I had absolutely zero say, including when I was 16 and my parents showed us a VHS tape (2002, folks) of the Disney Cruise Line. I was decidedly unimpressed until I got on board and had the best fucking week of my young life. But “surprise, a week of your summer vacation is gone and you have no say in it whatsoever” was the norm when I was growing up. Which was not that long ago. I was lucky if we managed to overrule my mother’s insistence at eating every meal on every roadtrip at a Cracker Barrel.