accidental feminist

wife swap = I heart dysfunction August 29, 2006

Okay, so I may have watched two whole episodes of this addicting swill, but I am not impressed. Some of my beefs:
* Peppy music for thin, happy couples, and sluggish, elephant music for the fat ones
* Treating people who are clearly mentally unhealthy as though they’re just quirky and frustrating. I.e. A woman who makes her “swap husband” do all of the cooking, cleaning, and dishes, while she sits on the couch and watches (no joke) soap operas, and claims that this is a fair 50/50 split of the housework, is not simply “a bitch”; she is ill. It’s not just frustrating or annoying that when she returns home her husband goes back to his pathetic, non-entity ways, it is tragic. They should really screen for mental illness; a thoroughly dysfunctional marriage should not be paraded across the airwaves like it’s someone’s bad choice in a horror movie (”No! No! Don’t go in there! No! No! Don’t let her bully you into quitting the new job you’ve gotten that gives you purpose and meaning in life!)

Basically, the whole show can be summed up like this: “bad” couple switches with “good” couple, and we all feel better about our lives (or finally get the courage to file for the divorce…)

Next stop: Shalom in the Home!

Model Citizens? August 24, 2006

Okay, I’m putting it to a vote: Should I allow my children to exploit themselves as child models? Bassie’s actually not as interested as Dina, who is convinced that being a model means wearing butterfly wings. What do my fellow AFers think: is the college savings fund worth the possible exposure to childhood anorexia and cocaine addiction? Hey, look, Drew Barrymore seems fine now…I mean, except for being offensively stupid.

four (beautiful) eyes

As you know, Bassie has glasses. As you don’t know, it’s worse than we thought. Her prescription is not -6.0, as previously thought. It’s actually -11.5. In case you don’t know, that’s really farsighted. Coke-bottle glasses farsighted. So farsighted, actually, that she has to wear contacts so that her vision is not completely distorted. Custom-made contacts, because she also has astigmatism in both eyes.

Lucky for us, she’s very lovable, because her contacts are really difficult for a five-year-old child to learn to wear, not to mention expensive. Sandra, our wonderful technician over at Lenscrafters has been doing everything she can to help make this transition. As she said “Anything for Bassie; I love her.” Yeah, she has that effect on people. Especially when she hugs them and tells them she loves them within ten minutes of meeting them.

Work it, Bassie.

revelation about my high school self August 19, 2006

Maybe it’s the Depeche Mode (or INXS? Who knows?) that I’m listening to as I prepare for my poorly attended 29th birthday party, but something’s getting me nostalgic for those more complicated high school days. You know, when everything you said was dissected by your friends and reassembled behind your back to your great chagrin and detriment? Well, anyway, I was thinking about Megan and John. Ah, yes, you know which Megan and John. And if you don’t, it’s okay, just fill in the blanks with the names of the same archetype from your high school days.

You see, they had the same predicament in high school. Super smart people who seemed so simple and straight-forward that people of the opposite sex fantasized that beneath that happy-go-lucky exterior, they were actually brooding even more than the rest of us. Megan had a string of obsessed young men follow her around, waiting for her still waters to run deep. She and I discussed her predicament many times, and she was quite open about the situation. “They think that I’m hiding some secret, deep person inside,” she’d tell me during Calculus (since neither of us understood what was going on, we would talk through class most days), “but what you see is what you get”. Interesting.

Now here’s the fascinating part, to me anyway. Many girls, including myself (if anyone who is reading this knows both me and John and didn’t know this they are clueless), had a similar enfatuation with John in high school. I was sure that underneath his too-laid-back-to-be-believed attitude and his seemingly simple view of life, there was some super analytical, tourtured genius. I was wrong. John’s an awesome guy, but, as Megan said to me about herself, he is what he is.

So…why did I accept the truth about Megan, but refuse to believe it about John? I mean, it seems so simple it’s ridiculous, looking back. Obviously, I had a vested interest in believing Megan, and in not believing John. My jealousy at all the attention Megan was getting for a person that wasn’t even her led me to be the champion of the “Stop Obsessing Over Megan” cause. But no one could convince me that John just wanted to hang out at the pool and play volleyball; because I had created an entire alter ego for him, and if admitted that it just wasn’t who he was, I’d be as much of an idiot as the Megan-lovers were.

Yosef is glad I have a blog so that he doesn’t have to pretend to seem interested as he listens to me tell him this whole theory in bed at 12:30 AM on a Tuesday night.

guess who(’s coming to dinner)? August 15, 2006

Bassie, Dina and I are playing “Guess Who”, a simple guessing game where people are categorized by simple visual traits: glasses or not, hair color, gender, etc (incidentally, what a wonderful lesson in how to reduce someone into a few distinctive physical traits and then “choose” them based on their having or lacking a particular trait). It’s the third round, and Bassie asks:

“Does yours have dark skin?”

Me: No.

Bassie: Okay (starts to flip down all of the faces with dark skin and sings) Yay yay yay…I always wanted to put down the dark skins!

I laugh, and Bassie has no idea why this is funny to me. The power of context…

the best things about getting a 37″ plasma tv with comcast digital cable (TM) August 11, 2006

*pausing the Colbert Report to get a snack
*watching “Entourage” on demand
*watching “Kingpin” from 1 AM to 3 AM on a Tuesday night
*watching all the “Girls Gone Wild” commercials I want- and just for the record, my favorite part of the commercial is when they ask the girl: “What would it take to get you to take those pants off?” Um, dude, first of all, she was willing to go with you in the first place. Second of all, you know how drunk she is, you gave her the seven shots of Jaeger. Frankly, and I’m not afraid to say it, I’m starting to feel even worse for the “Guys Gone Wild”. As Jazmin and I both said when we saw the commercial the first time: “What girl would want to watch…oh…right.” How immasculating!