Beauty fades, but stupid is forever

[First, I want to get this out of the way: I’m pissed that I and the rest of the internets are even talking about The Miss American Pageant and even that this archaic, sexist tradition hasn’t yet faded into obscurity—but that’s a whole ‘nother can of worms.]

Carrie Prejean’s (Miss California) isn’t a “dumb bitch” because she doesn’t believe that gay people should be able to get married. She’s dumb because she just SHOULD HAVE LIED.

So picture this: you’ve won umpteen beauty pageants to get to a national level and you finally have a chance to win it all, to finally make those confusing childhood memories of your mommy spray tanning you at age 6 worth while. And you’re just going to blow it all on one little question? JUST LIE!

So the most liberal member of congress was recently elected president by a strong majority, the gay rights movement is gaining momentum and people are pumped about it. And an effeminate celebrity blogger who calls himself “The Queen of All Media” asks you if you think that legalizing gay marriage is a good thing. JUST LIE!

So what if you’re actually a bible-toting, youth group attending, Archie Bunker-ette. JUST LIE! Make something up about how God loves everyone, even the sinners, whatever. Bush is out of office, honey. Being down with Jesus is no longer en vogue.

You didn’t spend all that time getting those highlights, a fake tan, or those refrigerator-white veneers to be REAL, did you? Of course not! Beauty pageants are for judging what’s on the outside, no matter what they claim. Status quo would have been the smart way to go.

Comparing Apples and Morons

Call me a latte drinking, bra burning liberal, but I have a casual interest in preserving the environment. That is, I recycle, conserve, and buy organic as much as my lazy, selfish tendencies allow. But when I see these stunts that companies pull to look environmentally friendly (like buying carbon offsets) with the sole purpose of looking attractive to customers, I get a little peeved.

Especially when I see something like this at my local grocery store:

Yes, those are apples, and yes, EACH APPLE is labeled with a sticker that says “organic.” Stickers, incidentally, are made of paper. Does the fact that those apples were not grown with earth-harming pesticides make up for all that paper that was wasted in trying to sell those apples to customers? Oy.

Yeah…What Keith Olbermann Said

The day after the presidential election, America woke up with a hangover: the realization that, despite taking a giant step forward in living up to the founding ideals of this nation by electing our first African-American president, California took a step back. Prop 8 passed with a not-so-narrow margin, banning gay marriage in one of the bluest states in the US.

Having grown up in California, I was more than surprised–and more than disappointed. But after reading about it, some of the pieces started to come together; it’s been inferred that Black and Latino voters, many of whom are strongly religious, came out to vote for a minority president and, while they were there, ticked “yes” on Prop 8.

IF this inference is accurate, that means these people are voting for all the wrong reasons, namely they want a minority in the White House simply because they too are minorities, and they want gay marriage banned because it aligns with their personal faith (a faith, I might add, that most people in this country do not share). If these people really voted for Barack Obama because they favored his ideals over McCain’s, wouldn’t they also support gay marriage? Sweeping generalizations aside, it just seems odd that a voter or group of voters would vote for one of the most liberal members of Congress, but vote “yes” on a ban on gay marriage, IF they weren’t making their decisions based on petty bias.

These two groups have been treated as second class citizens for decades. By voting for Prop 8, they hypocritically passed that hate onto another group.

I could go on, but Keith Olbermann expresses it much more eloquently than I ever could. Watch the video while I go hit things.

A Funny Thing Happened

I had one of those warm, fuzzy New York moments on my way to work yesterday: I was trotting along on 58th Street trying to quickly get to the subway in a vain attempt to make up for my late departure. My mind was running through my whole day: my grocery list, what time my yoga class was that night, unicorns, puppies, etc., and then BAM! The tip of my flip-flop caught the tip of the curb that I was mounting and my body was thrown into mid air.

My mind assessed the situation in slow motion: is this going to be a little trip? A stumble? A toe-stubbing? No, this one was going to be a full-blown fall–limbs splayed and personal belongings scattered–the kind where you momentarily forget about looking stupid and just focus on not breaking any bones or scraping anything near your face. My flip-flops flew off my feet and, just before my palms skidded along the sidewalk, I heard “OOOOOHHHH” from a random passerby (luckily this was on a side street, so there weren’t too many people around). Before I knew it, I was on my hands and knees on the sidewalk, my iPod still in one hand and my earphones miraculously still in place, and barefoot.

A nice man in a suit my father’s age stopped to help me up. I assumed he said “Are you okay,” but my music was still on and it took me a minute to compose myself and turn my volume down. The only thing I could think to say was “WHERE ARE MY SHOES?” He handed me my weathered, leather Rainbows, which were about six feet behind me. “You might need these,” he said. I managed a snorty laugh and thanked him. “Well, your day can only get better from here, right?”

Never Judge a Memoirist by his Cover

One February evening, my Spring ‘06 digital journalism class had a guest speaker, as we did about every other week or so. Since our other speakers had included such cyberspace pseudo-celebrities as Amanda Congdon, then of Rocketboom, Jessica Coen, then of Gawker, and Joan Walsh, then and still of Salon, I admit I was less enthused at the announcement that our next speaker was a (male and middle-aged) business columnist and culture writer from The New York Times who had recently become the Grey Lady’s very first blogger. Yawn.

As a class assignment, we were to write up the Q&A session as a profile piece. This was my “scene-setter” graf:

David Carr looks like any other family man from suburban New Jersey. With a self-described “radio voice and a newspaper face, ” he looks rather tired in his sharp, blue suit as he speaks in a dry, apathetic tone: “I seem sort of goofy and friendly, I’m not, I’m actually a jerk,” Carr said of himself. “I play a nice guy on TV.”

Vacate or Staycate

In the modern tradition of ugly word smashing (see also: vlog, Brangelina), a nasty little neologism has woven itself into our economically depressed 2008 lives: staycation. A staycation is when you take some time off of work, but you don’t actually go anywhere, since airline rates and gas prices are through the roof, and you probably didn’t get that big bonus this year, and for all you know, you may not even have a job in a few months. Who can spare the money these days on an extravagant vacation?

Many popular news outlets are offering some helpful suggestions for possible staycation activities–though not all translate to a life in New York City:

1. Take a leisurely bike ride through your home town!

Unless you’ve got the bravado of one of those Chinese food delivery guys, I wouldn’t call a bike ride through Manhattan “leisurely.”

2. Forget about your day to day responsibilities, like making the bed, doing chores, etc.
Unless your living room is 8′x9′, in which case you may trap yourself in a pile of laundry, dirty dishes, and/or empty beer cans. It may be weeks before concerned friends or coworkers come to dig you out.

3. See a movie!

Just not Step Brothers.

4. Go to the beach, lake, or any body of water near where you live.

If you go to this body of water (which is actually very fun), for the love of GOD, do not go swimming.

5. Have a cookout in your backyard!

Alternatively, you could toast up some marshmallows! On your fire escape! …Over a cigarette lighter!

6. Take plenty of pictures–after all, you’re on vacation!

“This is us on the couch…here we are, reading…another one at the kitchen table…here we’re back on the couch…”

A staycation can work wonders for your workplace moral. Because after two weeks of self-imposed exile, you might actually be looking forward to going back to work.

Day Three: Beignets and Cow Country

Wanting to savor a little more time in the Big Easy before heading into the cultural smorgasbord that is the state of Texas, we decided to take another morning stroll down Royal Street. I had a few shops in mind that were closed the evening before. One of them was some kind of voodoo shop that sold spices and books and things.

A bespectacled British man greeted us from behind a desk as we entered and told us to let him know if we had any questions. Only one or two other tourists were in the shop, and you could hear a pin drop. Glass jars of herbs and spices sat on an old, weathered shelf on one wall, and the other wall housed a small library of books on spells and witchcraft. I looked at some of the jars, which were labeled things like “success,” “health,” and…“cumin.” I guess witches in New Orleans like their spells nice and smoky.

Day Two: N’awlins

On Sunday morning, we were on our way out of Chattanooga within half an hour of waking up—we weren’t anxious to soak up the local color. More importantly, we were anxious to get to our next destination: New Orleans, LA.

A few miles into our second leg, we crossed the border into Alabama, which, interestingly enough, looks exactly like Virginia and Tennessee. After crossing into Mississippi, we had to stop for gas. Being in the middle to the state, our rest stop options were, shall we say, limited. We stopped at a non-name brand gas station with two gas pumps and a qwik-e-mart that looked like it hadn’t been renovated since 1929. I stepped out of the car into the overbearing Southern humidity and went to use the restroom as Andrew pumped the gas. I successfully managed to hardly touch anything while using the facilities (the small bottle of Purrell that I bought turned out to be a God-sent). When I came out of the bathroom, Andrew was waiting for me by the front door of the shop.

“You want to wait in here while I go?” he said, gesturing vaguely to the local characters just outside. I nodded and waited by the door avoiding eye contact with the sweaty, burly men in wife-beaters who were shamelessly looking me up and down. I starred at my feet with my arms crossed over my chest and practically ran back to the car when Andrew emerged from the bathroom.

Soon as we were back on the highway, and as I was trying to shake the mental images of the experience, Andrew asked, “So did the women’s room have a sticker that said something about all black people having AIDS, too?”
***
Glad to be out of Mississippi, we entered the toe of the boot in Louisiana. We were now on the I-10, which we would be traveling on for the rest of the trip. The highway entered New Orleans, but not before a 10-mile drive over a precariously narrow bridge-like road over the swamp. Once we reached the French Quarter, for a bargain $30, we (self!) parked our car in the hotel’s garage. Parking charges be damned, our hotel was in the perfect spot—right on Bourbon Street.

By the time we had checked into the hotel, I was, admittedly, a little cranky (I have just come off a long driving shift—I am definitely NOT a city driver). Luckily one of the restaurants on our list was literally across the street from our hotel, a kitschy seafood place called Oceana. After all, there’s nothing like a giant plate of fried shrimp to calm the nerves.

Everyone is always shocked to find that I, a wannabe foodie and cook, do not eat seafood. One of my few exceptions is shrimp. (It also doesn’t hurt that it was deep fried to hell.) Our waiter, Shawn, a pudgy, blond, late twenty something from Ohio, brought my fried shrimp on a luscious bed of French fries. “That didn’t look like enough to me, so I asked them to give you a little more shrimp,” Shawn said.
“Ha…well, thanks,” I said, thinking that it was either a joke, or that surely the the mound of fried food lain in front of me included said shrimp supplementation.

Well—no. About five minutes later, Shawn brought out ANOTHER plate of shrimp. Thanks, Shawn. But just because I’m a tourist doesn’t mean I’m going to pound down my body weight in fried seafood.

Day One: Leaving the Brown and Holy East Coast

We had been on the road not more than 2 hours. The backseat was stuffed with Chips Ahoy and Milano cookies that my well-meaning mother had bought for our trip, along with the healthy granola bars and bottles of vitamin water that we had quietly picked up the night before at the huge, suburban grocery store near my parents’ house in New Jersey (the thought of eating processed cookies while driving through Arizona in 105 degree heat made me gag). It was the first nice day of the year on the East Coast—in the low 70’s, not humid, and not too hot—perfect for a 12 hour drive. Not more than a few minutes after crossing the Pennsylvania state line (or “Pennsyl-tucky,” as Andrew liked to call it), we slowed to less that 40 mph on I-78 and eventually to a crawl. We lurched a few feet every minute or so before we came to a complete halt. After five minutes, Andrew sighed and emphatically shifted into park.

Manifest Destiny: Preparing for the Journey

Planning a 5-day, cross country road trip–on MY budget–has been no easy task, but thanks to The Internets, I’ve found some useful tools for vacay planning: