It occurs to me that it has been a while since I leisurely killed time in an airport duty-free shop. These trips are my normal time for stocking up on all the lipstick I don’t at all need. But the salespeople in the duty-free can see me coming from a mile away – sporting bright fuschia or, more probably, red, lipstick, they undoubtedly believe (and are not wrong) that I am an easy target. I never leave without a new lipstick. One saleswoman at Gatwick actually laughed and called me an “easy mark”.
Tonight I put on some red lipstick for no reason at all. I wasn’t going anywhere, no one was coming here – but suddenly it just seemed to be the salve for everything from dry lips to bruised heart. (Yeah, of course I am exaggerating for effect.)
My next project is to build a treadmill desk – and heaven knows I need to wear lipstick for that! Every occasion is a lipstick occasion.
You know how sometimes you get this feeling that you really don’t like someone and perhaps you feel like he or she is phony? And then something happens to reveal something about them that puts all the pieces together and sheds new light on their behavior – and you realize that that sense of dislike was really just your radar telling you that that person was putting up a front and not being himself? Yeah. When you are not yourself – you are often less likeable.
I recognize that there are plenty of times when I am myself and am still not likeable, but then it is really a matter of not getting along or seeing eye to eye. That’s fine. Not everyone is going to get along and like each other. But if you want to have the best chance of putting your best foot forward – in personal or professional relationships, you are going to have to be yourself. (Maybe with a layer of diplomacy baked in, but still – yourself, with your own ideas, your own voice, your own interests.)
I don’t say this because I think you should go through life trying to be more likeable. It is just that you are not living a full, real life if you are not living as the you that you know best. I realize that a lot of people have trouble with this because they don’t really know who they are, and some people are born “people pleasers” and would sooner jump off a bridge than go against the “make everyone happy” instinct that has propelled them through life. Ultimately you have to live with yourself and make yourself happy first and most of all.
I’m doing it. Listening to obscenely loud music in my house in the Swedish woods in the middle of the night while baking cakes and playing with a hula hoop – all a little off the beaten path, but I am who I am – and I like it. Even if no one else does. (Of course I know that some people do – it is just that it does not matter so much if they do if I am happy with myself.)
Funny thing about going on TV and movie-viewing binges – there are so many threads that connect so many things together. This past two weeks, for example, I have not seen a single TV show that did not use a reference to someone being another person’s “wing man”. It started when I went on a Suits-watching marathon, and there was an entire episode in which the characters were excessively quoting Top Gun (which is not even a film with dialogue – just a long series of annoying one-liners). After that, every show has referenced the ubiquitous “wing man” and in some other show (unfortunately I have half-watched so much TV that I don’t remember which show), the characters argued about who was Maverick and who was Goose.
Smaller connections can be seen if paying attention – binge watching allows for sewing together disconnected threads in specific series – but it also allows for small connections and thematic linking between things where there really is no reason to believe there are connection. For example, the obsession with Quaaludes in The Wolf of Wall Street pops up again in HBO’s True Detective, where Matthew McConaughey’s character wants to get some Quaaludes. Not to mention that McConaughey turns up briefly in The Wolf as a drug-obsessed Wall Street guy schooling Leonardo DiCaprio in how to behave (that is, take drugs, more drugs and only care about making money for yourself). And frankly, how often do you hear about Quaaludes in everyday life? Never. Now it’s twice in one day – thanks to entertainment.
TV
In the midst of other things, I have done a lot of wasteful TV and movie viewing lately. It’s on in the background while I do a million other things. There are plenty of other things I have been watching and love (not listed here, such as Shameless, House of Lies, Episodes, Justified, etc.), but I am only listing things that I have not really written much about elsewhere – new shows or things that I have something to say about them.
Among the dumbest or most infuriating shows:
The Following: This show just makes law enforcement look like it is all bumbling idiots, always ten steps behind. But the bad guy never quite seems like he could be smart enough to pull it off. In general the show just makes no sense to me because it is just not believable.
The Fosters: This is classic-style ABC network family programming with a “clever” (or not) title (the titular Foster family are also foster parents) and lots of hot-button topics (lesbian, biracial couple with a bunch of kids – one biological and the others adopted fosters). The good part is that this backdrop is not overdone or made to seem unusual. This is just the way it is. But the storytelling is one step away from overdramatic soap opera with too much shit going on to be real. So I don’t like the show, and both the leads (Teri Polo and Sherri Saum) lack the personal warmth to make them seem like loving parents – they try to oversell it to the detriment of the end effect.
Helix: I keep waiting for it to get better and it isn’t. I felt the same way about Caprica. And is it just me or is Billy Campbell becoming a worse and more false actor as he gets older? The only good thing is the actress who was Kat in Battlestar Galactica. I did not like her that much in BSG, but here she’s tough without the immature, annoying, extreme edge she had as Kat. Oh, and Jeri Ryan is going to show up any minute now, so that’s a good thing, right?
Looking: I don’t know – a show about a group of gay friends in San Francisco. Would be fine as a premise, but it just feels so pointless every week.
The Crazy Ones: I keep trying to watch this and this is not funny. The end.
How I Met Your Mother: I started watching this only around the time that the show was in its sixth season on TV. It could be quite funny for network comedy, but this last season is dragging out in the worst way. Boring and unfunny to an unmanageable degree.
Not bad but not good:
Nashville: This gets worse all the time. I want to like it because I really like Connie Britton. But every storyline is annoying and over-the-top. While all are annoying, the worst one is Rayna’s determination to start her own record label. It belies the whole direction of the music industry – and I refuse to believe that a huge star that this character is supposed to be would be that blind to the trends of the industry. Or that she would be so naive as to not realize the intricacies of the business and getting out of her contract. There is something naive about the whole story – her former label maneuvers against her by making a couple of phone calls (as if it is as easy as that) after we have just heard from another businessman that deals are made and cemented months or years in advance for retail shelf space. And the whole thing comes down to – who the hell needs retail shelf space any more? That’s the thing – why not try to move forward with your new, innovative, fresh label using the new, innovative, fresh tools that the modern music industry is built on? Most people are downloading and streaming. Getting distribution at Wal-mart or wherever is still part of the strategy for a huge star – but a huge, veteran star starting up a label would not be so completely blind to the business end of the business. And if she were, she would have lined up a lot more industry-specific advisers (rather than her sketchy sister?!) to help her plan and get the whole thing off the ground. She would not just mouth off at her music label and leave and decide to fly by the seat of her pants and suddenly find that she is stuck.
If they stuck with the music, this would be a better show.
Trophy Wife: Surprisingly funnier than I expected but still not something I cannot live without. I find myself questioning the man in the story – how is it that he just keeps getting married – and is he so lacking in discernment or so desperate not to be alone or just so open-minded that he married these three massively different women? I can’t figure that out. I mean really – who would marry that second wife? He seems too normal and put together to marry someone like that unless it was a whimsical rebellion after the uptight, driven and mean first wife? I don’t know, I really don’t.
Almost good, but not totally sure:
Orphan Black: I never planned to watch this but recently watched the whole thing – I was entertained, surprised and impressed with Tatiana Maslany’s performance in multiple, quite different roles in the same show. I will give the second series a whirl. I am interested in the ethics of cloning and identity, and this show has started to explore some of the issues that come to light as a result of this kind of scientific experimentation.
Suits: As a kind of entertaining filler, I am enjoying Suits. It can be a laugh, but it’s not classic television or anything. I enjoy the constant movie quoting and references the characters make to other things (Top Gun, Mississippi Burning as examples), but that’s the best it gets for me.
The best shows:
True Detective: By far the best new show I have seen. Understated, great cinematography, great soundtrack, great dialogue and superb performances. The tense relationship between the two leads, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, and their outstanding verbal exchanges, makes the show worth watching. I never imagined in my life that I would claim McConaughey had done something great, but in truth, he has actually built a fairly impressive resume without my paying attention. (His role in Dallas Buyers Club was pretty powerful, but I have not seen him do something as inspired as his role in True Detective.)
Movies
I watched a bunch of movies in recent weeks – but I have not really kept track of them. I saw Dallas Buyers Club, 12 Years a Slave, the recent Mandela movie starring Idris Elba… but there is not much to say about these films. It’s difficult to distill a film into just key points. And films like these – well, they’re kind of Oscar bait, meaning that everyone writes about them.
I saw the film The Wolf of Wall Street, and hated it. Frankly I don’t like stuff like this. Movies in which people behave stupidly, get all fucked-up on drugs and live and die by their own greed and excesses don’t do anything for me. I am only interested in the fact that Kyle Chandler is in a small role as a tenacious FBI agent. He’s just so bloody cute! Happily he will be in a new Netflix series soon.
In the same way that life sometimes repeats its ugliest patterns, I keep getting songs stuck in my head. Last night and when I got up today, it was Aimee Mann – “Amateur”
“Despite conclusions I drew/
There was a chance you’d surprise me…”
But there are never really any surprises – and somehow that still surprises me!
I am frustrated by my propensity for cultivating and caring for people, friends, etc. and feeling that it is never really returned. It is not always that these people don’t care but has more to do with their priorities being different, their inability to compartmentalize time enough to really dedicate themselves to or focus on one thing at a time. I suppose I get hurt by this at times because, with people where it really matters, I have carved out time and energy to devote to them without expecting (well, thinking I am not expecting anything anyway) the same in return. Because in the moments I devote to them, to friendship or love or what have you, that is my priority. Granted maybe my approach right now is selfish and assumes that others act on friendship as I do. Assumes that they care as much as I do. And I know this is not always the case because I have been on the other side of the equation – I care but not enough to make time, etc.
Perhaps what wounds me more is when I recognize that this pattern has repeated throughout my life. No matter how busy I am, how much work I take on, how many deadlines pile up, no matter how much travel I must do, I am careful to carve out time, reliably, when I care. If I can do that, then how is it that people who swear up and down that I am important to them and who have nowhere near the time constraints that I do (unless they are concealing a lot of information from me, which is perfectly possible) cannot? They seem to disappear from the face of the earth in what feels like precisely the only moments we could have had together.
The bigger question, then, is why am I agonizing and giving it so much importance and attention when clearly the feeling involved is not mutual?
There is the figurative idea of corporate suicide – what kinds of things can one do to commit his/her own form of corporate suicide? Something that causes one to fall out of favor?
It is too surface level and too far outside of everything to fictionalize, really. I skim the surface of my own life lived in the corporate world – wandering like a zombie through the halls teeming with those inoculated against reality by the shakedown of corporate life and language. I remain with calm, collected surface, never disrupted, but screaming underneath. I am reflecting on the painstaking choice of words reserved only for writers who have all day to think and no sales to make, no “value proposition” to introduce to shareholders and stakeholders.
But what about the non-corporate environment? The working world with production schedules to meet? That environment is equally tired, painful – fraught with the dangers of unaccomplished and dissatisfied late-20s to early-60s women all introduced too early to middle-age and its indignities, particularly for women. Rote, miserable work in production industries, visiting the “smoke shack” for smoke breaks, some with long coiling hairs growing from the face. Some incompetence. Some absenteeism until enough “occurrences” have accumulated to get them fired. Yes, even a legitimate illness is counted as an “occurrence”. Even in this environment, a lot of corporate bullshit language trickles down although the “troops” suffer less of it – subjected only in quarterly company-wide meetings to the talk of it. But where is the walk of it?
Moments like these, so very quiet and all alone, climbing into bed, I am not sure what to feel.
I think too much, which leads nowhere. Taking words at face value and wanting to believe them but second guessing belief and churning through aspects of disbelief, not even sure why there would be cause for someone to mislead. The doubt is always there, pervasive and tiring, nagging at me as I try to go to sleep for just a few small hours.
The quiet masking the noise in my brain, an onslaught of rapid-fire thoughts: reflecting on weird things like how people throw around the word “sapiosexual” as if it will win them points. How youth’s wildest women turn out to be soccer moms who throw tame Super Bowl parties. How it’s so French to make references to corporate suicidesen masse (thanks to dismally unhappy employees of Renault and Orangeoffing themselves in short succession). How there is a difference between communicating because you want to tell someone something and communicating just to put a salve on your guilt about how you failed to communicate at some point before. How much time I have wasted trying to be polite and preserve harmony when all I wanted to do was get rid of someone. How frightening people’s eyes can be sometimes. How I may once have been a luddite, but there is no turning back after you embrace technology.
Yesterday was an unusually rich day for reading about age – in particular how women are perceived as they age. Both by society and by oneself.
In one article discussing turning 30, the writer describes the arbitrariness of how women’s ages are perceived. “Age is a weapon society uses against women. Each year that you gain comfort in your own flesh, your flesh is seen as worthless.” A woman’s age, she writes, is never right, but a man’s age is always right.
And, she argues, it is not only about perception. It is also about keeping women down. If women really believe that youth is where it’s at – that everything fades away after 30 – they may not achieve all they can in life. If their worth is entirely wrapped up in the nubile sexual attractiveness tied to the “innocence of their youth” and the attached male attentions that come with it, what will they aspire to – will they ever ascend to the level of achievement that they might threaten the middle-aged male status quo in the professional world? “Better to tell women that youth is their best quality—that when their ass starts sagging and their face starts cracking, everything they love will fade away.”
But there is plenty of evidence that life doesn’t end (god forbid! “Older” people can still have a life!) at 30. The other article I happened across was a Slate article about women’s sexual lives and how women over 70 seem to be having their own sexual revolution. A lot of the women interviewed in the book the article discusses seem to have been very sexual creatures all along – or, in many cases, many embraced their sexuality only after hitting 60.
One woman stated: “…combination of feeling wild abandon and total comfort has been just amazing. After 70, there comes a sweetness about making love. We go slowly, there is no rush anymore. When you’re younger, it’s all about the orgasm, then it’s over. I love this suspended feeling, the absolute intimacy we have been able to achieve.” It is a bit much, perhaps, but if nothing else, the idea of looking at one’s intimate life (and all its facets) as striving for wild abandon, total comfort and this inexplicable suspended feeling is worthwhile.
I don’t want to sit around thinking about the septuagenarian set going at it, but we are all going to get there. Not to add that the Germans have already given us a film that removes any doubt about what elderly sex and relationships would be like (Cloud 9). It even covers this topic – where the main character, a married woman, has an okay relationship and active sex life with her husband, but then she meets an even older man and connects with him in a way that involves this aforementioned “wild abandon and total comfort” that is so rare in relationships at any age.
If the article imparts anything, it’s that you don’t wait for your 80s to try to find this kind of satisfaction and depth of feeling/connection.
Age is just a number, and I am fond of reminding people that it is never too late to do anything. As the writer of the Vice article on turning 30 stated, “The only real thing 30 took from me was the sense of limitless time.” There is thus an urgency to what we do, no matter what we do – at any age.
Watching on Al Jazeera a show about Colombian pilots flying perilous routes in rickety old DC3 aircraft through the Amazon (apparently with clear and present danger of crashing and never being found again once the jungle overtakes the wreckage), I am struck by the background music choice, which seems entirely too whimsical and Calypso to be appropriate. As a narrator explains that the pilot/captain Raul must calculate his fuel needs precisely or else crash, there is this playful carnival music going in the background. Yes, nothing like frolicsome music to evoke the “fun” of a possible fiery crash whose remains we would never find. (Al Jazeera has a whole bunch of these “daredevil” shows where people are doing the craziest stuff to make a living. A few weeks ago I saw some Pakistani lunatics driving on narrow, twisting mountain passes in giant, ornate trucks. And I think my commute is a bad one.)
Jet girl… jet ski! I had a hilarious conversation last night before leaving for work in which I was reminded that there was probably a cigarette ad that included idiots on a jet ski. I had my doubts, but my dear firewall was absolutely right.
Idiots advertising cigarettes on a jet ski
Jet ski! … “Après ski”! ”This kind of evening could be life enhancing…” “She gets what she wants but still she ends up losing”
When I am not overdosing on sad movies or documentaries, I overdose on news. And this leads me to two thoughts – Ratko Mladic acting like a spoiled idiot child at Radovan Karadzic’s war crimes trial – refusing to take part in the “devil’s proceedings” and demanding that a guard bring him his dentures apparently (which makes me wonder why he went to court without dentures in the first place)? Second, the crazy urge for news outlets to be first with any news. I read somewhere that the news of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death was reported – not just by tabloids but by theWall Street Journal – without any concern for whether his family had even been informed (never mind confirming the veracity of the claims).
Oh well I am too tired to analyze. Instead considering Donna Summer’s roles in alternate universes and hoping for just one day when the cars outside my office window will not honk. Since they built new tramlines and stoplights right outside, not a day passes without a lot of impatient honking (especially for Sweden).
When I get sad – for good reasons or no reason at all I am also tempted by sad movies (believing while watching the stories unfold that things could always be worse).
Yesterday, apart from watching a documentary on Mitt Romney (and see his whole Mormon family pray together), I watched The Hunt(Jagten). Great film – disturbing, great performance from Mads Mikkelsen and, in keeping with my preferred theme of “it could always be worse” – I can see that the story of a man falsely accused of child abuse is one such strand. Speaking and listening to Danish is the other such strand. Any language one speaks, s/he can console him/herself that at least it isn’t Danish.
