Deep Thoughts: The Spilled Coffee and Soap in the Eye Edition

• Postage is ridiculously expensive. Ridiculous. Guess how much I spent to send a 3-pound box (holding a pair of flip-flops, hideously sparkly sneakers, and slippers—shoes for before the wedding, during the wedding, and after the wedding for a friend) to Israel. $25! What? This makes me especially nervous as my plan had been to ship my belongings cross-country to my non-existent apartment when I move this summer. The road-trip option just does not appeal to me.
  
• I have this razor. Not because I have ever felt the need for a vibrating razor but because it was on sale and, so, cheaper than the other versions when I went to buy a new razor. It has a battery, which is sealed so it doesn't get wet and electrocute you or do whatever other obviously bad things happen when batteries and water mix. But there is a crack in mine, which might mean it's time to retire said razor. Because being electrocuted by your razor while shaving your legs is no way to go.
  
• My bad days recently have been freakishly bad—broken heel, soap in my eye, coffee down the front of my shirt bad. I feel like I am living in a cartoon. I may be flattened by an anvil next.
  
• There is something that seems very wrong about staying up all night tonight to cook for Shavuot and thus not being able to stay up all night on Shavuot learning. I'll try to avoid, but my insane idea of making muffins, two kinds of cheesecake, and lasagna may make that hard to do.
  
• Also, there is nothing about this entire article that makes any sense.

The Twitterati and the Times

Part of the beauty of language is that it adapts as society changes so as to enable us to express ourselves in a changing world. But part of the beauty of dictionaries, stylebooks, and copy editors is that they are slightly reluctant to change, and, in so being, they allow for a lag time to see whether words and ideas really become a part of the lexicon or whether they're just a passing fad before we adopt them as our own and print them in our newspapers.

 

The NY Times is famously rigid on style and slow to adapt, which is, in my book, most of the time OK. So, why, oh beloved NYT, have you printed the word "Twitterati" 149 times. Twitterati? Really? (And yes, some of those instances are probably in quotes and some are on NYT blogs, which should have a slightly different standard) As far as I'm concerned, the jury is still out on whether Twitter is here to stay, so it's more than a little premature to be printing Twitter-related made-up words. In the paper of record. Dontcha think?

 

End rant.

 

(Though, do check out this Flutter video.)

The Past and Future of Media in a Graph

You can find it and more info about it here. I don't like the fact that the future involves no newspapers or magazines, and I'm certainly not convinced it's what the future holds, but an interesting graphic nonetheless.

Your Degree or the Size of Your Bottom?

"I don't think there's any contradiction between an interest in pencil skirts and one in political programs," says the author of this Salon piece. And I—the girl currently in a pencil skirt and 4-inch wedges—certainly agree. But the same article posits that the overwhelming coverage of Michelle Obama's sartorial choices "underscores exactly what many women have always feared: that even if you're an Ivy League grad, the size of your bottom in a Narciso Rodriguez dress matters more than your degree." Which is the worry, put quite well, I think.

 

I don't agree with a lot of the other things she says in the article and I don't really feel like writing a long post on gender right now (it's not like I've never done that before) and I don't even know who Narciso Rodrguez is, but I just wanted to highlight this apt articulation.

Her Daughter's Friend's Husband's Brother

Yesterday a sort-of relative left me a voice mail trying to set me up with some guy her daughter's friend's husband's brother knows. Or something ridiculous like that. Though I fully maintain that the Jewish geography is not a stretch until there's a dog involved. He is a lawyer, which figures—I'm doomed to date Republican lawyers forever. Or until I marry one, says my sister.

 

Anyhow, I called back and told the sort-of relative that, well, I'm moving cross-country, so ... (That was too easy, right?)

 

Without skipping a beat, she said, "Well how about him for your sister?" As if my sister and I are interchangeable? The same person? Looking for the same thing? None of these things are true. Also, she didn't even specify which sister. (Sister who reads this blog: Wanna go out with him? I can call the sort-of relative back.)

 

I guess this is not quite as bad as this time when I didn't want to go out again with a guy (Starbucks in the Heights for one hour? Seriously.) who did want to go out again. The woman who set us up had the brilliant idea of setting my cousin up with him solely so she wouldn't feel bad telling the guy I wasn't interested. As in: "Eli7 had a really good time. She doesn't think it'll work out, but she thinks you're such a great guy that she'd like to set you up with her cousin." 

 

Sigh.

Deep Thoughts: The Springtime Edition

"Springtime in the city

Always such a relief from winter freeze

The snow was more lonely than cold if you know what I mean

Everyone's got an agenda

Don't stop keep that chin up you'll be alright

Can you believe what a year it's been

Are you still the same?"

 

• Going paddle boating in a skirt is ... challenging. (Friend: I have a feeling everyone is going to see our underwear. Me: Then wear nice underwear.)
• Aside from the whole preventing-skin-cancer thing, I should start wearing sunscreen so I don't get ridiculously shaped sunburns.
• The only problem with flip-flops: the fact that your feet pretty much end up covered in city dirt, which is probably just as bad for you as not wearing sunscreen.
• Spring jackets, even gorgeous ones, should not cost $900. At Filene's Basement. Just sayin'.

 

Deep Thoughts: The Mother's Day Edition

More like lots of links. Not so many thoughts. But, hey, my computer is dead, and I haven't had a nervous breakdown yet. I think I deserve some serious applause.

• Meghan McCain writes an article that doesn't make me want to pull out my hair, revoke her Columbia degree, and scream, "Girls can be smart and care about things other than shoes." (I like shoes as much as—if not more than—the next girl, but if I got to meet Henry Kissinger and then blogged about it, probably I would have something more intelligent to offer than a picture of his shoes.) This from her article:

Unfortunately, Republicans typically don't like to discuss or deal with things they think are wrong or immoral. And that's a huge mistake. If we can't discuss birth control in addition to abstinence, and in a nonjudgmental way, kids will continue to make bad choices for lack of having access to informed, safe options.

• Gail Collins on shoes and feminism: "There was one minute back in the late 1960s when the women's movement tried to convince everyone that being liberated involved wearing sensible shoes. It was not a success." I can be equal to men even with blisters on my feet, thank you very much. (There's much to say about the Supreme Court, Souter's exit, and women, but I will save that for another post.)
•  Add this to the list of "Ways in which mothers terrify other women about having children." Seriously, it's a wonder that women have children after hearing these stories. In other news, Happy early Mother's Day.

"I asked them to shoot me like a wounded horse at least twice. ... Those women who say they forget the pain after it's over? Not me. I will never forget that pain. I actively try not to forget. But I'm also not fool enough to think I can ever describe it in words, except to say that you are carried away to a different plane of being."

• Klingon: It's an entire language. It "sounds like an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk"
• An article on toilet paper and the recession. Yes!
  

Rubber Duckie, You're the One ...

... You make bath time so much fun.

 

My sister and one of my friends (probably more than one, but I don't keep a mental list of my friends' bathrooms) have the world map shower curtain, which is awesome and which I have long thought was the shower curtain I would get just as soon as I was in need of a shower curtain. (Though I have always thought it was weird that the map is on the outside—wouldn't you want to be able to study it while you're in the shower?)

 

To be sure, there are other cool shower curtains: the SAT words one (which I am past, I think), the Spanish vocab one, the solar system one, the self-affirmations one, to point to a few.

 

But today I found this flip-flop shower curtain—and indeed a whole flip-flop-themed bathroom. This is amazing. I need this bathroom.

 

(And yes, I have started planning how I am going to decorate my non-existent apartment because it is way less stressful than worrying about finding an apartment and roommate. It's also less stressful than researching cars, which was my first stress-relief approach, for which I needed stress relief.)

The Three Most Important People in History

If you had to name the three most important people in history, who would you choose?

[Think about it.]

My picks were Avraham, Gutenberg, and one of the Founding Fathers (I know it's a cop-out to not actually pick one, but I am not sure which one had the most impact on the perpetuation of democracy). Below is the list I compiled, mostly from responses to my away message. It's interesting to see people's three picks together, but this is just a list of all the picks, for convenience's sake. Asterisks indicate the person was chosen more than once. (It should also be noted that the people who responded were a pretty narrow group of people, for what it's worth.)

Avraham*
Moshe*
Jesus*
Alexander the Great
Napoleon
Queen of Sheba
Gutenberg*
Socrates*
Newton
Martin Luther King Jr.
Jim Henson
Mother Theresa
Muhammad*
Benjamin Franklin
Adam*
Chava
Julius Caesar
Galileo
Freud
Darwin
Da Vinci*
Ben
Jerry
the guy who invented the husband pillow
Plato
Hammurabi
Rosa Parks
The guy who looked at wheat and thought "hmm how about making bread?"