The ‘Dredge Report

This article is a few weeks old and involves friendˆ3 (that is, friend of friend of friend), but I found it sweet and charming. And this:

The great thing about dating foreign women is they don’t have the same prejudices about sci-fi that many American girls seem to have. To Gabriela, Star Trek was just one more part of our weird, monolithic pop-culture. “Ryan Telling Me a Star Treck Episode From Start to Finish” is a cute illustration of this aspect of our time together….

Which episode was I telling her about? I’d given her the rundown of several, so it’s hard to say. I like to think I was telling her about the episode in which William Shatner tells Joan Collins that in the future, a poet would recommend replacing the phrase “I love you” with “Let me help.”

…almost makes me wish I’d ever seen an episode of Star Trek in my life.

All half-assed Marxist critiques aside, I suppose I just don’t understand why everyone keeps trying to review the Sex and the City movie as if it’s a real movie. Like, with plot lines and character arcs and themes and shit. This was meant to be a bowl of ice cream for the show’s fans. That it went two steps too far and became an enormous sheet-cake that makes one slightly sick halfway through eating it isn’t the point. As a reluctant yet devoted fan of the show, this movie was deeply satisfying. Deeply.

Still, it was disappointing that to see that the casting director decided to address one of the most valid criticisms of the show—its perennial lily-whiteness—by casting Jennifer Hudson as Carrie’s…wait for it…sassy black sidekick. Seriously? That was the best you could do?

Some INCREDIBLY JUICY SPOILERS (just kidding, they don’t ruin anything, just click) below:

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In just a week, I’ll be sweltering in a polyester-blend cap and gown, sitting through the third, and hopefully last, graduation of my academic career. Yesterday I picked up the packet of information that tells us where we’ll have to line up and sit and stand and assemble and de-ssemble and smile and collect our diplomas. Before I could leave, the Student Affairs guy pulled out an enormous cardboard box full of squeeze toys (not for dogs, but for stressed out office-drones. You know what I’m talking about, right?) These toys were made to ressemble fruits and vegetables. Potatoes, carrots, mushroom caps, apples, oranges, eggplants—quite a variety. These, he explained, were the items our class was going to toss up in the air at the end of the ceremony, instead of the traditional cap-tossing.

I chose grapes, because wine comes from grapes, which is more than I can say for eggplants. But honestly, the whole thing seems ridiculous. After all, we’re not just a nutrition school, though we do have a department of nutrition headed up by the diabolical Dr. Willett. I can think of a dozen items that, while less colorful, would be a more accurate representation of the school’s academic mission. Condoms, for one. Copies of Stata. Reams of cost-benefit analysis. Syringes full of vaccines.

I, for one, plan to mount a protest of n=1 and toss up this adorable little guy, which a former colleague gave me last Christmas with the following note: “Remember when public health was still about public health?” Who knew typhoid fever could be so cute?

Via Kay, this post from the F-Word centers around the all-too-common scenario of women professing guilt to themselves and one another right before eating something totally delicious.

I think there must be an awful lot of front to it – if a person really did suffer such horrendous guilt for eating cake, then they probably wouldn’t eat cake. Creating the guilt is a way of proving that although you are eating cake, you are a good girl really because you feel so bad for it. You get to have your cake and eat it too. I think it’s a sort of female bonding thing. We’re all in this struggle together sisters, trying to control our wayward bodies in a world that contains cake!

Kay goes on to comment that all the calorie-counting-”straight to my thighs” talk is enough to put her off her meal:

Perhaps I’m just being a snob about this, since I’ve never struggled with weight loss or gain, but quite frankly the last thing I want to hear about while I’m putting something tasty in my mouth is how many calories I’m consuming.*

Allow me to offer a slightly different perspective, as someone who has struggled with weight loss and gain since about the age of 10. Samara’s right: this isn’t about guilt. It’s about self-doubt, about being unsure whether one’s body and weight and eating habits are normal–whether they fall within the bounds of what’s acceptable for women in one’s peer group. (Consider it duly noted here that when it comes to women and their bodies and all of the mind-numbing crap that most of us have put ourselves through at one point or another to look a certain way, there is no normal). We pick up these cues from the women around us, from our girlfriends and mothers and grandmothers and aunts and cousins and sisters, and more often than not, we subconsciously start integrating what we’ve learned into our own behavior.

Case in point: When I was growing up, my grandmother(s) and aunts and my mom and I would sometimes have girls’ lunches out at nice restaurants. It didn’t take me long to figure out that it was only acceptable to order a salad-as-entree and an iced tea, even if you really wanted the fancy cheeseburger or the French dip sandwich. My sainted grandmother, one of the loves of my life, exemplified the behavior that Samara describes in her post: Always order a dessert, but split it with someone. Or talk about how sinful yet irresistible that molten chocolate cake is, and mention how many laps you’ll swim tomorrow to work it off. But eat it anyway! Even today, into her 8th decade, my grandmother still tells me about her latest attempt at SlimFast (this happens once a year or so), despite the fact that she’s the healthiest senior citizen I know. Despite all of the amazing things that she’s done in her life, she still judges herself at least in part on her pants size.

This is, clearly, crazy. Insane, right? Right. Except that it’s really, really hard to step off of that bizarro Ferris wheel when you’ve been on it all your life. It takes time, and some discomfort, to stop thinking about every meal as a chance at redemption. It takes courage to confront your thin friends when they half-heartedly complain about French fries and thighs and all the rest, fishing for reassurance that they’re really okay. For the fat girls, who almost never engage in the verbal calorie-consciousness above for fear of drawing attention to themselves and their eating, it takes a Herculean effort to eat with friends and not take cues from them, not to measure themselves against a yardstick that, while cruel and arbitrary, still exists in the culture at large.

So that’s the thing. The doubt-masquerading-as-guilt charade that women participate in when faced with the prospect of eating in a group is annoying. Yes, it is tiresome, boring, unattractive, and ultimately pointless. But we need to be kind, and patient. When it happens, either refuse to engage or call someone out on it, in a kind way. Having allies helps. I remember one of the first times I consciously decided that I wasn’t going to participate. I had thrown a party at my house in D.C., and was hanging out in my room with several female friends, waiting for others to arrive. Two of the girls were tall, lithe, size-2-ish, gorgeous, and they started swapping lines about The State of Their Hips. “Mine are huge! I can barely fit into these jeans anymore!” vs. “Mine are too narrow–I look like a boy!” This went on for awhile, and I briefly considered stepping into my role as The Funny, Chunky Girl Who Proffers Reassurance Through A Zingy One-Liner, nearly cracking some weak joke about how my hips were big enough to have their own zip code.

But instead I looked at my other friend, M., who had, like me, been trying to extricate herself from the Self-Doubt Bullshit Olympics. We glanced at one another and shared a look borne by close friendship and cemented by our cynicism and experiences at a women’s college. The look was simple. It said, “We are so not playing this game anymore.” The conversation ended abruptly, and we went back downstairs, to the serious business of draining cheap kegs and talking to friends-of-friends.

Don’t play the game. You cannot win if the cards are marked.

UPDATE: Damn, totally forgot to mention The Obesity Myth, which is pretty great save for one weird chapter about Bill Clinton’s weight. Highly recommended.

Via Riceplate, something I won’t be eating tomorrow at M.’s barbecue: Bacon on a stick, with french fries on the other side (affixed by corndog batter). Which reminds me, it’s been way too long since I’ve gone home for the Texas State Fair.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, it’s nearly 80-degrees out, the birds are chirping, and I’m sick. But one presses on, so I’m going to commemorate the occasion by commencing with Module 1 of my latest self-improvement project, which is watching all of the classic films that I missed during my child- and young adult-hood. And there are many. During my latchkey days, I was too busy fighting with my brother over who was entitled to the last sleeve of Saltines and watching Dre videos and re-runs of Salute Your Shorts on Nickelodeon. Later on, there was never time to watch the Godfather when finals and The O.C. loomed large over me.

Anyway, Module 1 is War Films, Vietnam. Tonight we’ve got The Deer Hunter, to be followed by Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, and Apocalypse Now. A mini-WWII Module consisting of Patton and The Bridge On the River Kwai will round out the experience.

Future modules under construction include: musicals (god, do I hate musicals); westerns; Hitchcock; Bergman; Anything With A Hepburn, Gable, Bogey, or Bacall; and Anything With a Pacino, Brando, DeNiro, et al., Made Before 1985. Suggestions welcome.

Because that means I never had to open up a magazine and see something like this. Little Fibber? Really?

This is kind of cool, so if you’re in New York soon, you may want to take a look at it.

Like everyone else, I’ve been on eMusic for a few years now, and at first it was like a giant candy-coated playground full of music that I wanted and needed immediately. Now, when I log in every month and see my “65 downloads remaining,” my heart sinks. Scoping the site and downloading 65 new tracks each month has become a chore akin to going to the gym: I’ll get to it eventually, but only because I’m paying for it. This is due in part to the fact that the site seems to have dropped quite a few labels and bands that should by all rights be there. So I hear about something new on Pitchfork or WOXY or through a friend, and I search for it on eMusic only to find that it’s not there. Sure, the band’s mediocre debut album from six years ago will be front-and-center on their profile page, but who wants that?

So despite eMusic’s great utility in helping me to expand my music collection, especially in genres I don’t normally wade through, like soul, jazz, and classical, I’ve had enough. I look at my iTunes library and get protective: “I have all the music I need, and I don’t need any more shitty post-punk albums of the week.”

Please help. I’ll post my downloads if you will chime in with suggestions. So far this month:

• The Mountain Goats, Heretic Pride. Their new one; I can’t help myself.
• Telefon Tel Aviv, Fahrenheit Far Enough. Wait, you don’t like this kind of stuff, do you?
• The Kinks, Muswell Hillbillies. I know almost nothing about the Kinks and this is my first step in reversing that.

Help me, in comments.

The new Mates of State album is out, which means you should have downloaded it yesterday. Much has been written about how adorable the band’s married-couple members, Jason and Kori, are together, and it’s all true. Personally, I think Re-Arrange Us is really good. Maybe not quite as good as Bring It Back, but I’m still humming along to nearly all of the songs after only five or so listens–no small feat for yours truly. Relatedly, here’s an old interview and some acoustic songs that the band recorded, including a rendition of “Crazy” thrown secretly into one of the tracks.

The things that I love about Mates of State—their compulsively listenable songs, the way they make Bambi eyes at each other on stage without grossing me out, the fact that they take their daughter on tour with them, the sweetness of it all—are not typically what you think of when trying to drum up a list of your all-time favorite bands. But I can’t help it. I love these guys, and they love each other, and that makes me believe in love.