Sunday, November 14, 2010
C'est comme ça
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Big world, little trashcan
In my daily life in France it can sometimes feel like I’m once again a pubescent fourteen year-old—I’m constantly knocking into things, misjudging ceiling heights, and generally struck by the feeling that I’ve suddenly become taller, ganglier and clumsier. This has to do with the fact that everything in France is much smaller than it is in the US. This can sometimes mean things are neater and more tucked out of the way, but just as often it can mean that spaces, such as rooms, are compressed, even though certain contents that cannot be economized anymore than they already are—toilets, for example—remain the same size. I’d just about had it the other day when, using the bathroom in the home of a friend in Paris, I banged my head on an exposed water heater, placed perfectly at tourist head-smashing level. To make matters worse, when I instinctively drew up a hand to nurse my wound, my forearm caught a framed picture hanging on the wall. (Thankfully I caught the picture before it fell, making my head the only damaged article in the room.) Walking out of the bathroom—the walls of which had seemed in the process to close in even tighter like the trash compacting room from Star Wars—rubbing the sore spot on my head, I praised my reflexes, which I’d never more felt were a result of my American genetic make-up. I will surely need those reflexes to survive in this dollhouse of a country.
And the flip-side is not as nice as it sounds. In fact, it’s often really infuriating as well. Take for example the absurdly miniature trash cans commonplace in homes and public buildings alike, such as the thimble-sized one above. (To my eyes, these tiny waste containers do not have the capacity to house the tissues of one single nose-blowing episode from a family of mice, let alone a day’s waste from a human being: the French generate a freakishly small amount of waste.) After locating, under a table in the kitchen, say, the Honey I Shrunk the Kids trash can—the location of which can be extremely difficult in and of itself, because not only is it normally not at eye level, it’s probably not at chest level, or even waist level, but probably at something more like ankle level—I find myself having to bend down to insert my trash in ways that my body, previously accustomed to human-sized trashcans, just cannot bend—are all French people gymnasts? At this point, after nearly pulling one or both of my hamstrings, I’m furious at this stupid, ridiculous, exasperatingly small trashcan. All I want to do is kick it, yell at it, and (not so) proudly walk out on it, knocked-over and defeated on its side.
These episodes would be much less infuriating and make a lot more sense if French people were considerably smaller than we are. But—fat jokes about Americans aside—they’re not really. (Ok Americans are bigger, but the point is trashcans and bathrooms have been bigger in the US since way before we became the diabetes nation.) For this reason it can feel, at times, like a personal rebuke to America’s large-and-wasteful-but-proud-of-it mentality. And so, even such mundane interactions as the trashcan episode kick my patriotism into gear. Of course, it’s not that—a personal rebuke of American culture—, but it makes me feel bad about myself nonetheless, like a neighbor who regularly recycles when you don’t.
These moments of exasperation with life in France—a fully First World country—make me feel spoiled and needy, and as a consequence moody and defensive of the reasons for my feeling spoiled and needy. What these moments of exasperation also lead to though, is the awareness of how much the tiny little cultural differences matter—the size of trashcans and of glasses of water at lunch, or the spatial arrangement of bathrooms—and how much I love and appreciate the way it is at home.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Barack Obama is the same as Glenn Beck? Sorta. This headline is meant to catch your attention? Yes.
Love him or hate him, Glenn Beck has a lot of viewers. Millions actually. Why and how has he garnered such a following? His androgynous, boyish complexion gives him the appearance of a lesbian who makes a point not to wear make-up, so it's probably not his looks that get people to watch (see: Anderson Cooper). What is it then? You can smugly write-off his massive, cultish following, disregarding these millions as ignorant rednecks, which is in fact how many liberals approach it. Fortunately, I won't do that. Not exactly, anyway.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
This is a post I submitted to the Columbia Cycling blog:
(The picture above shows the sprint finish at the end of my first race. I'm in the center, in blue.)
This past weekend, at Rutgers, I raced a bike for the first time. For me personally, there was a lot riding--yes of course the pun is intended--on these couple of races. And it was more than being able to tell people that I didn't shave my legs for nothing. Over the past couple of months I've invested a lot of time and energy in this thing. It probably wasn't much compared to what more serious cyclists do, but for me, it was a lot. And besides the actual training, I had made bike racing one of my main things. I told my friends about the training, and how much I cared about it; I told myself I cared a lot about it; I gave up other activities to make time. And what's more important than your time?
So I was naturally anxious about the answers this weekend would provide to some of the questions I'd had for months: would I enjoy racing as much as I predicted I would? would I do well enough to justify all my training? and what the hell is a crit, anyway?
Well, I got my answers all right. To sum up, racing bikes is just about the funnest thing I've ever done. Ever. Sure, it helped that I did well, but the main thing was the feeling of being in the pack, going over twenty miles per hour, my senses heightened and my focus laser-sharp. Everything happens so quickly. At one point during the crit, there was a crash right in front of me. It took everything I had to avoid it and stay on my bike. But after narrowly escaping the crash by going off-road into the dirt for a few seconds, and sprinting to catch back up with the field, I found myself smiling. Because that's what it's all about--the high stakes; the danger at every corner; and the rush of getting out alive. All I can say is, I can't wait for the next race.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Shutter Island review
What is reality? Am I crazy? Did I just soil myself? Are Leo Dicaprio's eyes really that blue?
Monday, February 22, 2010
I bet you think this joke is about you
Uh oh. Palin has a history of taking jokes about her a bit personally. When David Letterman joked a little while back that Palin had come to New York for the purpose of going to Bloomingdale's to update her "slutty flight-attendant look," she wasn't laughing. Her response was that Letterman had missed the real point of her trip, which was to attend an autism conference. On top of this, she also let fly some barely incoherent, sanctimonious babble—the kind of dialogue that we’ve come to expect, and that I’ve grown quite fond of—, this time something about the degradation of women. Sarah's right, Letterman did miss the point, and I'm guessing he missed it on purpose, because autism conferences don't make for good jokes. Like a true, gross politician, she made a pretty harmless jab into a self-important advertisement for herself about the good deeds she was doing.
But jokes about her family are what get her truly riled-up. In June, Letterman said this: "Sarah Palin went to a Yankee game yesterday. There was one awkward moment during the seventh-inning stretch: her daughter was knocked up Alex Rodriguez." Palin's response was to lash out at Letterman, calling him “sexually perverted” for making sordid references about what she believed to be her then 14-year old daughter, Willow. In his own response, Todd Palin, the husband, threw in the totally harmless words "rape" and "despicable," just for good measure. It should be clear to anyone with even a decent sense of humor that Letterman's joke wasn't that funny, as is the case with most of his stuff. But I also thought it should be clear that Letterman was not talking about the 14 year-old Willow, but the 18 year-old, uber-pregnant Bristol. I guess I assumed this because it seemed to me that a joke about one of the Palin kids being pregnant would, most likely, be directed at the kid who was pregnant—not the un-pregnant 14 year-old. Sarah, darling, sometimes you are such a retard.
Okay, that brings me to the next point. Gear-up the DeLorean and fast-forward to last week. ("We're going back...to the future?")
After the Family Guy episode, Palin asked, "when is enough enough?" (I'd ask Palin the same question, as her seemingly unquenchable thirst for media attention has led her to bring daughter Bristol into the spotlight. Bristol has recently worked as the spokesperson for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, as well as for the Candie's Foundation. You could look at her as the perfect person to speak for abstinence, or as a humongous-ly hilarious parody of herself.) In response to the episode Bristol said, "When you're the son or daughter of a public figure, you have to develop thick skin. My siblings and I all have that, but insults directed at our youngest brother hurt too much for us to remain silent." "If the writers of a particularly pathetic cartoon thought they were being clever for mocking my brother and my family yesterday, they failed," she said. "All they proved is that they're heartless jerks."
They are definitely heartless jerks. Seth Macfarlane and the other creators of Family Guy have made it clear over the years that there is no one they will not offend, and they seem to have a jolly good time doing it. But let's get some things straight. If you actually watched the episode it would painfully obvious--yes, even to Sarah Palin--that it was breaking down stereotypes and empowering an oft-degraded character, and that it was not, as the Palins suggest, picking on an easy target with cheap humor because it could. In any case, the Palins' responses to the show's portrayal of someone with Down syndrome bring up some interesting questions with answers that are not so concrete. In the interest of publishing in a timely manner (and also to save your eyes from staring at a computer screen--seriously, go for a run or something), I'm going to do this piece in segments. Here's the first question I pose:
1. Are some things off limits to joke about?
Boy, this is a toughie. After some soul searching I admit I am torn on this question. As a person who stutters, I am perhaps more qualified to answer this question than other, more genetically perfect people. Whether or not this is true doesn't really matter because I got your attention now. My opinion on this is that making certain topics off-limits, like Down syndrome, takes the power out of the hands of the person who's afflicted with the thing; they instantaneously become a victim--even if they don't want to be. It's the same concept as someone stopping a schoolyard fight because she thinks the bully is going to kick the crap out of her friend. Well, yeah, maybe, but that's the way it has to go: it's a nice gesture, but the friend must be given the chance to fight his own battles.
Think people with Down syndrome can't fight their own battles? This is what Fay Friedman, the actress with Down syndrome who played the character on the episode, said in response to the Palins' comments: "I thought the line...was very funny. I think the word is ‘sarcasm.’ In my family we think laughing is good. My parents raised me to have a sense of humor and to live a normal life. My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way the former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes."
Boo. yah.
Also, outlawing certain topics from being used for humor, or making certain topics taboo gives power and importance to those who use them in a real malicious way. Where before these people would just be a-holes, they now become social criminals, rising from anonymous idiots to infamous jerks.
I said I was torn though, and I am. There are definitely downsides to being laissez-faire about this kind of thing. Language is a huge part of what instructs us on how to treat other people. Every time we use "retard" or "fag" as a derogative word--even if we're just joking--it subconsciously trains us to think of people we assign those labels to in a derogatory way. Maybe once won't do much harm, but hundreds of those over time add up to some serious brain rewiring. Think, "the cow goes mooooo".
To be continued.