Neck braces!

Since I’ve been talking about my personal hygiene habits a lot lately [aside: I notice that I’ve developed an odd fondness for the phrase “a lot” also…I had to stop myself from using it about 400 times today], I’ve decided to revisit a favorite topic of mine that gets sorely neglected here: television. You know, as everyone knows because I’m a snob and I shove it down people’s throats, that I don’t have a TV. But unlike most people who don’t have TVs, I can still admit that TV is awesome and that I go through phases of mild addiction.

My live-in friend and I have lately been watching some a little more embarrassing than usual. I know, I know; you’re asking yourself what could be more embarrassing than my recent foray into the world of watching Xena. And if you are patient I will enlighten you. There is something a little more embarrassing than heavily melodramatic fantasy television with a lot of gratuitous female nudity and that, my friends, is sports melodrama with gratuitous cheerleader nudity. And what’s worse, I don’t even understand football.

So yeah, Kevin and I have been watching Friday Night Lights, mainly because Ira Glass watches it but also because we are easily overwhelmed by emotion in fake teenagers. I got a bit misty eyed when this one teenager (who was paralyzed) told the coach that he was sorry if he’d let him down. When he muttered that from behind his neck-brace my head all but exploded. Coming from a town where football was given little funding and even less notice, the idea that someone would remember that there had been a game going on during their catastrophic injury is perplexing.

But then again, I’ve never been much for team spirit and all that. Mainly I was always into jaded female warriors fighting the forces of evil. These two facts are probably related.

In which I list the names of the drug stores that I visited

I’ll warn you right now; this is going to be a boring one. It’s going to be one of those warbling, pointless entries where I talk about my favorite boring things, like shampoo brands and deodorant scents. I’m a creepily domestic person and I know it well.

So here’s the dealio: After an evening spent grubbing on enchiladas and house hunting, my live-in person and I went off to run a few errands. It was a fairly boring affair; we needed conditioner and deodorant and I was willing to spring for some face wash and a brand-spankin’ new loofah if the price was right. Despite our scant list and our pedestrian (oh, so pedestrian) taste in beauty products, we went to 3 different stores before we were able to find what we were looking for. I’m disappointed in Target, CVS, and Walgreens today.

As it turns out, both my husband’s deodorant and my conditioner are being phased out. Phased out! Replaced under a guise of “new and improved,” as though the science of hair-care and smell-reduction weren’t already fully formed sciences. I was finally able to find my conditioner at Wal-Mart in a new snazzy (aerodynamic?) bottle, but my best pal had to choose a new brand of deodorant. I won’t succumb to the terrible temptation and point out that having to pick a new deodorant is the pits.

Puns aside, I really sympathize with my main squeeze; I’ve been using the same brand of deodorant for years. (Hint: It’s the same brand as my shampoo and conditioner. As a smell-impaired person I like to think that means all of my fragrances “match.”) And getting a new brand is stressful. In fact, I might just come out and say that deodorant itself is pretty g.d. stressful.

I remember when I first started wearing deodorant, around the time that I turned 12. From the beginning it was a fetching symbol for the murky underside of the adolescence that I was trying like the dickens to suppress; I kept my stick in my bedroom and put it on before I changed from my pjs. (Disclaimer: I swear I’m not alone in this freakish preoccupation...When I was a teenager I had a friend who stored hers in a decorative wooden box to conceal it from her brothers.)

After a few years I got over this fear and started leaving my stick in the bathroom cabinet and putting it on after I changed, trading those awkward side-of-shirt deodorant smears for small white flecks on the collar of my crewnecks. I started to take a little pride in my deodorant and the glandular regularity that necessitated it. I consider myself an avid and enthusiastic deodorant user now, but that doesn’t mean I want to go switching brands willy-nilly. When I finally switched from the brightly colored Teen Spirit sticks to my current staunchly white and powdery stick the transition was difficult and I have no care to repeat the process.

There were benefits, though. For one, I no longer smell like a pack of sweaty Skittles.

I use so many hyphens when I'm sleepy

Writing from the perch of sleeplessness at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, I am appalled at my lack of interesting commentary. If I ever had this scenario outlined to me (as people are apt to outline blogging scenarios in casual conversation) I would have assumed that I had a juicy, nerve-wracking reason for being awake at such an hour and would be thus amply supplied with blogging materials. Unfortunately, I just cannot sleep.

This is shocking to peeps of my acquaintance, surely, because I have never been one to have trouble sleeping. Usually I am far too fond of sleeping. Not that I am one of those marathon sleepers (I’m usually up around 9 on the weekends), but rather one of those people who is irreparably bitchy when I don’t get the daily recommended dosage of snoozes. But getting that sleep was never a problem for me before approx. 1.5 years ago, after which the cycle of job searching and (ironically) the subsequent employment encouraged my natural anxiousness to encroach upon my scheduled sleep-time.

And so I am awake. And I am thinking about Gossip Girl. And that’s rather depressing.

Why is a rational person like me thinking about Gossip Girl? It so happens that just before going to sleep last night I watched an episode of the show. (It was my first, but maybe a season finale? I don’t know; I streamed it online.) I watched the show out of a morbid curiosity provoked by my mother discussing over dinner how scary (actual death-scary, not just this-is-our-culture-scary) teen vampire shows can be.

As she spoke it occurred to me that I had never seen any of these supposedly over-sexed teen dramas. In the three years since I’ve had a TV, I have rarely had occasion to regret my sparse and selective internet streaming habits…except when I realize that I am missing something excruciatingly bad.

I hate to miss bad things: I relish bad movies, bad TV programs, bad haircuts, bad tattoos, and especially bad personal anecdotes. In light of this, I decided that I needed to investigate this new generation of crap TV. And because I am about 2 years behind the cultural learning curve, I decided to watch Gossip Girl.

With the exception of the voice-over, the show didn’t differ from the teen dramas of my youth enough to scandalize me. The conflicts and goals were fairly similar (poetic break-down of social castes, overemphasis on graduation as an epic event, sexual fraternization between shockingly attractive teenagers who are hella, hella, hella in love). But there was one similarity that I was surprised to see made the cut: parental subplots.

If I may wax indignant on the subject of hour-long teen dramas, I must say that this is their most abhorrent feature. While I am trying to focus on the boyfriend stealing and substance abuse of these rich and attractive teens, the action keeps being interrupted by the romantic and financial intrigues of their rich and far-less attractive parents. Is this done to fill in the hour? Or do people actually enjoy these plodding subplots about the parents of adolescent lovers becoming lovers (substitute becoming an alcoholic, going bankrupt, or getting the capital ‘D,’ Divorce) themselves?

Come on, the CW, I don’t care about these people. They aren’t in high school and thus their lives aren’t relevant to mine.

Social network name dropping.

I divide my internet free time into three clean categories: stalking via blogs and social networking, reading liberal slant publications, and looking up horses to buy on craigslist. I have found, much to my utter disdain, that lately two of these have been overlapping beyond my level of comfort.

I won’t leave you guessing any longer than it takes to build a rudimentary level of suspense (A horse with a blog? Craiglist has a twitter?). I mean of course, that social networking sites have been gaining an alarming degree of legitimate mention in the press. I’ve been reading articles as of late that take great pains to praise Facebook as a serious and useful social networking source (the counter-argument being that it’s an unbelievable waste of time disguised in charming blue and white) to call out Facebook-outsiders as making a grave and damaging social statement. And when I happen to chance across an article that doesn’t list Facebook as subject matter, it often commits a more grievous crime by quoting a status-change or a twitter post as news.

To be clear: I love wasting time on the internet and when I’m not harping on about nothing on twitter I’m subduing my general angst with the calming blue-and-white of Facebook. But perhaps that’s why I find this sudden shift toward popular acceptance by what I would term “adult industries” like journalism so very disconcerting.

You see, in my prime Facebooking (I can verb it, I’m fb old school) years there was nothing legitimate in the least about social networking, beyond the sheer egotistical satisfaction of wracking up friends and drunken photo tags. In those days (let’s call it circa 2005) anyone over 25 on Facebook would have been branded an automatic creeper.

“Get back to myspace, you skeeze-bag,” the collegiate masses would have shouted metaphorically, rejecting this aged friend request with a practiced click.

Now, however, the actual news sites are covering the introspective quandaries of Facebook while I’ve got friend requests from three uncles sitting in my inbox. Man do I miss my youth.

So here’s the clincher for me, Facebook is a subject for satire, not for actual news because it’s damn ridiculous. Maybe I’ve penned too many “Caterday: Drink on Saturday” Facebook invites and spent too many hours perfecting my “Buffy Fandom” score to respect anyone who can reference it with a straight face. And I hope any journalist quoting twitter winces every time they attempt to sign in and get the little cartoon birdie proclaiming “Opps, technical error!” in its cutesy font.

Ask yourself, ladies and gents, whether you’re really taking a suped-up chat-room with photos and a “Poke” option seriously. If you aren’t interested in being taken seriously, just contact me using the Build-Your-Vampire-Army application, because I'm always looking to pad out my friend list.

Out of practice, in a hurry

If I ever got it into my head that I was going to write some scathing and hip-ish novel about the real suburban youth, I would have plenty of terrible scenes to pepper it with.

Not that I’m not tired of people trying to tell me (statistically, artistically, televistically) that the ‘burbs are about the roughest place to live. I recently fled my midtown apartment for the suburbs, and let me tell you: it’s not nearly as hard-core as the WB primetime teen line-up wants you to believe. Another lie from that stupid dancing frog with the top-hat (Am I dating myself a little much here? Viva Roswell. )

These people aren’t plotting and adulterous; these people have garages. And people with garages have plenty more to do than enable their druggy, inevitably promiscuous and so terribly jaded teenagers. They can stand in their garages. And I simply won’t believe that anyone who can wash their clothes without having to hike a few blocks could really be unhappy enough for any real wrong-doing.

To return to my point (and make a quick exit to more sociable waters), I have the perfect scene for my scathing hipster comedy. Within this scene the protagonists go down to the drug store and hang out, wandering down all of the aisles and feeling the shoe-inserts.

Whatever spazoid came up with Napoleon Dynamite wishes he’d thought of that one. And probably also wishes that his lasting legacy wasn’t a bunch of twenty-something’s in ski boots over emphasizing the word “Gosh.”

Just when I discovered a good away message for being in class...

Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.

I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.

Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.

Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:

1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.

2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.

3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.

4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.

An exercise in brevity.

I simply can't abide those army surplus style backpacks.

Furthermore I am madly procrastinating against writing an essay on amoral overly sexualized male characters in 18th century operas.

What I would very much like to do is watch some more Buffy the Vampire Slayer (specifically from the pre-UPN 3rd season) because I am undergoing a hearty revival of appreciation for sappy teen drama with a smidgen of sci fi.

I am eating peaches from the can with a fork and feeling mildly ashamed.