it’s not about you

Joshua and the kids and I went to look at a two-bedroom apartment yesterday. As we were finishing up our tour, I went downstairs to talk to the leasing agent. She was finishing up a conversation with another prospective tenant, so I stood there and waited for them to finish. He asked her on his way out the door and down the steps if she was also the one showing the place on Capp Street. She didn’t know which property he was talking about.

As he was walking down the steps, I moved closer to ask her a few questions and jokingly called out after the man, “Which place on Capp?”

The leasing agent turned to me and firmly said, “Oh, you don’t want to live on Capp Street - that’s not a good area.”

I looked at her for half of a second while I debated in my head what to say next.

“Actually, we live on Capp Street.”

You could see her visibly try to recover.

“Oh, so that’s why you’re moving.”

“No, we’re moving because we have a family of four in a one-bedroom apartment and we need more space. I love where we live.”

She then started talking about how she had heard it wasn’t a good area and so on and so forth and I re-emphasized how I liked where we live, that it WAS a good section and in no uncertain terms put to rest her her misperceptions.

Don’t talk bad about my ‘hood, yo.

Oh, and we won’t be renting that apartment after all.

Regarding the Imus “scandal.”

First of all, let’s just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America’s TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ’s sake. Paris Hilton — dumb, rich — gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they’re basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.

The idea that NBC — the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson’s tits — was “offended” by the use of the word “ho” is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that “ho” would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can’t see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony’s-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn’t originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren’t spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal — they’re wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks.

via a very brave article in Rolling Stone.

I’m getting a little tired of hearing people nowadays talk about the “Emergent church,” when what they really mean is the “emerging church.” There’s a big huge difference, and the nuance seems lost on the masses.

Emergent is a BRAND, people, not a descriptive. Get it right. It’s like in Texas, where we call all sodas, “Coke.” As in:

“You thirsty?”

“Yeah.”

“You want a Coke?”

“Sure.”

What kind of Coke do you want?”

“A Dr. Pepper.”

Or it’s like squares and rectangles: all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares. All Emergent churches are emerging, but not all emerging churches are Emergent. The capitalization should be the first clue.

Emergent is an organization (or a movement, or a conversation, or whatever), and while many emerging churches and people involved or identifying with the emerging church would find affinity with this organization, many would not and many would have no clue what it even is.

This must be fixed. It’s annoying the crap out of me.

Equal sues Splenda. Splenda says “nanny, nanny, boo, boo” in a sing-song voice, while sticking its thumbs in its ears and waggling its fingers at Equal. Equal sticks out its tongue and then says, “I know you are, but what am I? Jinx! No backs for all infinity!”

McNeil says that the process it uses to manufacture Splenda starts with sugar, pure and simple. To make sucralose, McNeil adds three chlorine atoms that are naturally found in foods like salt and lettuce to a molecule of sucrose. The sucrose disappears in the manufacturing process, but the result — sucralose — is 600 times as sweet as ordinary table sugar. Splenda then mixes two bulking agents, dextrose and maltodextrin, into the sucralose.

The chemistry is complex, and it may be baffling for a jury to hear about a process that starts out involving sugar but ends up lacking it.

Despite its use of sugar as the starting point for making sucralose, nowhere do the words “sugar” or “sucrose” appear on Splenda’s ingredient list. That is because under Food and Drug Administration regulations, it cannot list a substance that has vaporized during the manufacturing process.

Maybe if they go to court, the judge and jury will rule they both have to cease and desist creating either product. They’re both creepy. That and the fact that the sugar business is lucrative to the tune of $10 billion a year - well, it all just scares me.

Suburban parents dote on and hover over their children, micromanaging their appointments and shielding them in helmets, kneepads and thick layers of S.U.V. steel. But they allow the culture of boy-toy sexuality to bore unchecked into their little ones’ ears and eyeballs, displacing their nimble and growing brains and impoverishing the sense of wider possibilities in life.

There is no reason adulthood should be a low plateau we all clamber onto around age 10. And it’s a cramped vision of girlhood that enshrines sexual allure as the best or only form of power and esteem. It’s as if there were now Three Ages of Woman: first Mary-Kate, then Britney, then Courtney. Boys don’t seem to have such constricted horizons. They wouldn’t stand for it — much less waggle their butts and roll around for applause on the floor of a school auditorium.

via “Middle School Girls Gone Wild,” an editorial observer column from the New York Times.

In other girlhood news, check out this article: What’s Wrong With Cinderella?, also via the New York Times. It’s a much longer read, but as a mother of a Cinderella girl, who refers to herself as the princess and me the queen (not to hard to argue with that!), I found it very interesting. Also as someone who is concerned with the limitations and expectations that will be placed on my daughter (as well as my son, of course) simply because of her gender, I found it very interesting. I found it very, very interesting, because I have a daughter, who as I have written before, “lives for sparkly.”

That’s fine and good, just so long as sparkly isn’t all that there is to live for.

Now this sounds like a great idea.

The Compact originated in December 2005 at a San Francisco dinner party, where guests decided to take recycling one step further and go for a year without new purchases. Consumerism, they said, is destroying the world and most of us already own far more than we need.

The exceptions are food, medicine and underwear.

I wonder if it’s feasible. And I wonder if diapers count as underwear.

via the New York Times.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

Grrr…

Despite her hard-won reputation as an astute businesswoman, Ms. Bartz found herself repeatedly skipped over during a recent meeting of business and political leaders in Washington. The reason was that the men at the table assumed that she was an office assistant, not a fellow executive. “Happens all of the time,” Ms. Bartz says dryly, recalling the incident. “Sometimes I stand up. Sometimes I just ignore it.”

Her plans had to be put on hold, however, when she discovered during her first week on the job that she had breast cancer. After undergoing a mastectomy, Ms. Bartz ignored her doctor’s recommendation that she recuperate for six weeks. She did not want to appear fragile or weakened, and she returned to work after four weeks. (Asked about questions tossed her way that a male C.E.O. would never receive, Ms. Bartz said that during a news conference shortly after she disclosed her cancer, a reporter asked, “Which breast?”)

OH MY GOD.

via the New York Times.

Parents of young girls (or boys):

This should scare the shit out of you. I know it did it to me.

A few quotes:

For generations, parents have been wailing “they’re growing up so fast,” while, according to many academics and psychologists, the smallest among us are being exposed to more and more adult themes at younger ages. The effect is impossible to quantify, but in the progression from Barbie to Bratz and beyond, much can be learned about how society has blurred the lines between children and adults, and sexuality and gender roles.

Handler’s great insight was to see that from the way girls played with paper dolls, there was a market for a doll that looked more like a grown-up, one who was pretty and fashionable. Barbie’s original target audience was 9- to 12-year-olds.

Today, the idea of 12-year-olds playing with Barbie dolls seems ridiculous. The “tween” market has exploded in recent years — to the point where designer Marc Jacobs is taking 12-year-old actress Dakota Fanning as the face of his spring 2007 clothing line. Chuck Scothon, president of Mattel’s Barbie division, emphasizes the multiple incarnations of the brand — “I always say, there’s a Barbie girl for every age” — but says that “Barbie toy strength is cornerstone for ages 3 to 7.”

“It programs them to do stuff they can’t understand and we don’t want them to understand — being sexy. They learn the appearance of sexy before they know what it means (bold mine).”

A 2000 study commissioned by the Girl Scouts of America called “Teens Before Their Time” concluded that “Physically, girls’ bodies are maturing earlier than ever before. Cognitively, they are acquiring information about the world at an accelerated pace. … The dilemma is that these same girls do not have the emotional maturity, nor do they have the information, to match their accelerated aspirations and expectations.”

Extreme gender divisions, she said, can hurt future relationships. “When you’re taught that what females are supposed to be are objects, you’re taught that happiness comes from being the right object, buying the right object, not from deeper, more internal, more meaning-making things,” Levin says, noting that doll play is where girls internalize that message. Levin worries that when it comes time for romantic relationships, both genders will have narrow expectations of each other.

Okay, so there are more quotables from the article and I have many thoughts on this, but will probably flesh that out in the comments section, so please comment. I know that saying so means nobody comments, but hey. This post has been marinating for too long and it’s time to get it up here. Or perhaps I’ll add an update edit to the post.

I wonder where Polly Pockets fall in that line… Not real sure, but I will guarantee you Judah will not be getting any Bratz dolls. I know what you’re thinking - famous last words. People thought we’d give up on the cloth diapers and electronic toys too, but we haven’t.

After the incident (and the resulting, huge, PR nightmare Delta is currently facing) a couple of weeks ago, I REALLY wanted to write something on here in response, but couldn’t without using a lot of letters, if you get my drift. So I found a self-portrait I took at Tracey’s house while we were in Texas, and found someone who’s funnier than I am.

Some parts of the breasts are okay–the cleavage, for instance–but the utilitarian parts are, objectively speaking, abhorrent. Victoria’s Secret employees understand this. They spend their days supporting and lifting the objects in question, so they know. And when a nursing woman was asked to feed her child in the employee bathroom, that’s what they were trying to teach her—that those circles in the middle of the breasts are the dirty bathroom parts.

Nursing women are killers, and they must be stopped.

What I wish I’d written.