1. “I like China ’cause they take their fireworks serious. I wonder what their 4th of July is like.”
I look over.
He gives me a big wink.
2. He plays guitar while we’re watching crappy movies and tries to improve the movie by giving it a better soundtrack. Sometimes it even works.
When I was young, I didn’t understand the whole concept of a cover tune. I had issues, what can I say? And so I was convinced for a while that I was psychic because a song would come on the radio and I would, although I’d never heard it before, know all the words. It might have been nice of my parents to disabuse me of that notion, but I can see the humor in having a second-grader running around the house thinking that she’s psychic and so I try not to hold it against them.
Anyway, I dig a good cover tune and so at the moment am digging on kd lang’s version of “The Air that I Breathe.” I’m shocked to learn that the original was by The Hollies, as I would have guessed (turn away now, Ginger) it was a Bee Gees song. I guess it’s the harmonies at the chorus.
I love kd lang’s voice, so smooth and strong and no matter what she asks of it, it seems to be able to do it.
I’m a ball of nerves, I have to admit. It doesn’t have anything to do with this post, just that this post is not doing a good job of distracting me. The family descends again on Friday. Then next week is my cousin’s wedding and we still don’t have a plan for the dog. And I don’t know why, but this is really starting to piss me off. I want to bring the dog. I want to stay someplace that will let me bring the dog. Everyone else in the family gets concessions made for them because they have husbands with weird issues or children with weird issues or whatever. I want to have a weird issue–like, my dog must come with me if the Professor is unavailable to monitor her well-being–and have people acquiesce to me every once in a god damn while.
And then I go to Boston for the play, which will be fine, but I feel like I can’t even look forward to it because I have to take care of all of the logistics of all the shit that comes before it.
Edited to Add: Residence Inn, if you’re not lying, I will kiss you on the mouth. Pets welcome and a Marriott discount. It’s going to be awfully hard to continue to be grouchy if I can take Mrs. Wigglebottom to Michigan.
1. Kleinheider upsets my breakfast by emailing me this link to Cynthia’s post about this crazy ad that is supposed to encourage you to eat Brazilian yogurt. Sincerely, if I looked like that naked, I would have Chris Wage on speed dial, just call him up and be all like “Wow, have you seen how great I look naked? Don’t you want to come over and take pictures of me?”
2. Another of you emailed me a baby Viking helmet. If I knew how to knit, I would so be all over the baby Viking helmet. Coble! Is it possible to make one of those in “world’s biggest head” size?
3. I know some of you grouch, “Oh, why does B. put up with those conservatives? Why can’t Tiny Cat Pants just turn into Tiny Cat Pants Full of Turds We Can Fling at Conservatives?” But look here at Lee and tell me, can’t you, just a little bit, see why, though I tease, I can’t help but love them?
Argh. I’m sorry. I just can’t get past one. Maybe it’s just the whole incident from last week, but I’m rubbed raw about this idea that, if I appear in public, my appearance is up for public judgment. I certainly believe that people will find whatever they find sexy sexy and that there’s not much use in asking folks not to look at each other and ponder each others’ fuckability. That seems like a universal human pastime.
But it’s that next step that just pisses me off–that because we all like to look around and wonder about the fuckability of the bodies we see around us, we have the right to be surrounded only by bodies we find fuckable, and, if confronted with bodies we don’t find fuckable, we have the right to announce our verdict.
In simpler terms, it irks me that there’s this idea that men hold the standard for what women’s beauty is and that it’s y’all’s job to enforce that standard AND that, if we don’t want to be publicly humiliated by whichever man appoints himself judge that day, we should take care to internalize the standard and hold ourselves and other women to it.
I mean, look at the slogan of that ad, “Forget about it. Men’s preferences will never change.” Don’t ignore the beauty standard and just learn to be comfortable and take delight in your own skin or you will never be chosen by a man.
Shoot, there’s a lot there to unpack, but let me just point out, again, how revolutionary pleasure can be. There is a photo of a beautiful woman taking pleasure in herself (leaving aside for the moment the issues with portraying women as if we all ought to be available for public consumption) and an ad campaign is designed around the notion that we dare not emulate her or not man will ever love us.
Look at her.
That’s insanity.
Edited to add: I just want to reiterate how weird this is. We are, presumably, supposed to want to be loved by men in order to be happy. Here is a picture of a woman who appears to be happy. We are supposed to identify with her and decide that, rather than being happy with how we are, we should deprive ourselves in order to look good–be unhappy–in order to get a man so that we can be happy. But we’re supposed to identify with a woman who is already happy.
Do you see how fucked up that is? “Happy women, you must be unhappy or you will never be happy!”
Tiny Cat Pants 