I am in The (dreaded) Container Store, who sends me mass mailing after mailing encouraging me to spend a grocery bill on a new closet shelf, and the DJ is killing me.
It is not by choice but by last resort that we've come here. An old house, built for Depression-Era needs, does not have the closet nor kitchen storage space for modern-age wardrobes and gluttony. You have to invent new places to put "stuff," when that stuff ("needed" or not) gets in the way when not in use.
Everything here is expensive. Everything here seems like a quick, almost intuitive way to simply solve a storage problem -- yet with a giant, "where else you gonna find it?" premium slapped on top of what a reasonable person might pay to solve a little clutter.
As I said, we've come here as last resort: Because Big Box hardware's many standard-issue items are made for the giant spaces of new suburban homes and usually don't fit our old house. We've come here only now, because neither of us ever wants to go to The (dreaded) Container Store, but neither of us trusts the other's convenience/aesthetic/utilitarian taste to make the right choice, on his/her own, from among limited options.
This much-delayed trip is about three years in the making.
And while we're already having this otherworldly, elaborate conversation in the store aisle about our kitchen routines and what's easy to dust and what would look sort-of-tolerable-okay in our mismatched ancient kitchen -- and I'm all too acutely aware of how silly and suburban we sound and how T(d)CS staff must hear these same mundane conversations 100 times a day -- it is made much, much worse for me by a selection of Ace of Base, REO Speedwagon and Rick Astley on the in-house stereo.
It's already annoyingly silly yet necessary conversation in an annoying setting. But it's made more annoying by the realization that The (dreaded) Container Store -- which has thought so carefully about it's customer impression that even its bathrooms are filled with lots of "ooh, look what they thought of!" Container Store touches -- has decided that people who want to passively hear this music are its customer base.
As a kid and teenager, I had to hear my share of REO, Astley and Ace of Base-like nonsense thanks to the tyranny of Top 40 and the poor guidance of the girls I chased. [Now, they even resurrected Astley and his white-guy dance for this year's [corporate] holiday parade in New York (Why, God, why?!?).]
The beauty of adulthood and independence, I always thought, was finally getting away from these people. And here The (dreaded) Container Store is telling me that you can't get away from these people, they're all around you, and I'm one of them.
This is the first year where the inclination to call my father at the stroke of midnight -- whether Czech time or my time -- has no physical human recipient. (Surely I've written about this tradition before, haven't I?...Ah yes, there it is. I knew there was a reason I kept this freaking journal/blog thing.)
I could consider it poignant that what I wrote a year ago no, it was TWO years ago(!) both commemorated this tradition and foreshadowed his death within a TWO year's time -- but in truth, he'd been foreshadowing his own death for the past decade. No Nostradamus points there. Seems that's how people by-and-large die once they reach a certain age and survive a certain number of medical setbacks.
Anyway, seems when he passed [Ed.: It's died! My mother hates euphemisms like "passed." Wait, wait, but I'm just picking a different word from the paragraph before! Ed.: Doesn't matter. Try again.] in October, this is one of the things that occurred to me: I'd need a new tradition, or a new lucky recipient for the midnight-ish call. There's too many candidates, though. (Half-tempted to prank call drunk dial a random Czech number instead.) And the advantage of having some one seven time zones away is either you or they are not otherwise detained at the stroke of midnight. When you only communicate with someone a handful of times per year, the most regular occasion comes to mind as they die.
So anyway, the "like, wow" not-very-profound thought for the moment is that around 5 p.m. (midnight Czech time) this time around, New Year's Eve 2008-09, I was indeed watching hockey, which is one of the few ways my father connected with me or anyone. And it was interesting to see the modern-day NHL figures and uniforms and contrast them with the bulkier jerseys and chalkier broadcasts that we watched together in the memory of my formative years. Further, this holiday I saw a reunion show of one of the local almost-made-it bands that the First Night sister mentioned in the above linked story introduced me to as the proverbial "she's the one who took me to my first all-ages show" sister.
Like I said, not very profound. But an instant-oatmeal way of igniting mixed reflections on the passing of 20 years, the "passing" of my father and a cherished-if-somewhat-superficial tradition, and the relationship between older siblings, pre-high-school music tastes and the uber-cool "I already know about them" hijinks of teenage music one-upmanship.
First Night sister introduced me to a few good local bands who are now doing annual holiday reunion shows to commemorate what-almost-was 20 years ago, before they had to pursue "real" careers (except for one of them -- there's always at least one who's still following the dream avenue, whether it be having to play for Guns N' Roses or just plain pimping solo albums).
And while that's only superficially "fitting" in a forced TV drama kind of way, it's nonetheless one of the elements that's entering my mixed head on this, the first New Year's Eve where my father literally isn't alive to pick up the phone at the other end of the undersea cable. Apropos of nothing, this is also the first New Year's in 15 years where First Night sister -- who moved from town this year -- won't be around.
Ah well. A pour of damned-good cognac and a raised toast to the confusing departed father and to everyone else I hold more understandably dear. Cheers.
"The paradigm has shifted. Dating is dated. Hooking up is here to stay.
... I should point out that just because more young people seem to be hooking up instead of dating doesn’t mean that they’re having more sex (they’ve been having less, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) or having sex with strangers (they’re more likely to hook up with a friend, according to a 2006 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Research)."
--Charles M. Blow, New York Times Op/Ed, Dec. 13, 2007
Aww, man! Tsk tsk, born too late.
See, B.H. and I would sometimes have this conversation about sex, I forget how it started (our conversations originate from some pre-Big Bang primordial soup of whim), where we each had a wish for how things really ought to be. I'm pretty sure it started because we each just wanted the sex, but we observed all kinds of annoying, unnecessary inefficiencies that complicated matters, so we used all of our philosophic powers to fix them.
The Solution [Note: the following theories are not necessarily endorsed by Mrs. Fall of Because, nor would she necessarily associate closelyat all with anyonetool who had the couragebrazen will, much less chance in hell to practice them.]
B.H. said sex should be as casual as a handshake or trying on clothing -- an activity you could do with whomever you pleased ("Hmm, let me try this in red, medium."), with no disrespect -- no relation, even -- to existing long-term relationships.
To distort his words: "I'd like to have sex with anyone I want without it being a sign I somehow love a girlfriend any less." I think he wanted to be a swinger for life, and he wanted a "single" partner who saw casual partners as nothing more than food preferences.
[Mind you, this is the man who hilariously called ME an "emotional autistic" when my dad died -- as in, "This must be very hard, even for an emotional autistic..." I was walking through New York City when I read that text from him, and it made my day, sent me cackling down the sidewalk.]
But back to the sex relations theory. B.H.'s "handshake" is a bit extreme -- I've been forced by custom to shake so many unwanted hands. But my wish was that sex were divorced from the expectation and pursuit of a long-term mate. I was fine with monogamy once you, you know, vowed it -- but before then "hooking up" itself should be taboo-free. (If there must be a bad rep for breaking the taboo, one should earn it by the quality, not the quantity, of one's handshake partners.)
My reasoning was that everyone wants to have sex, and guys will generally do and say a lot of things they don't mean just to land it. Girls, meanwhile, also want to have sex but will, generally speaking (their motives are mysterious and confusing), want to see some kind of expression of earnest from the guy in order to release it.
Which results in the following timeless phenomenon: Guys lying about their intentions (and acting against their own long-term wishes) to get sex; girls forcing guys to lie to them, causing these girls to unlock sex for people whose intentions they thought they knew but did not actually know, with consequences they would not understand.
The resulting dishonesty and mistrust is a disservice and inefficiency to both parties: Each is trying to acquire a long-term goal (men: lotsa unattached sex; women: partnership) by using short-term means that undermine that goal (men: having to pretend to want partnership afterward; women: providing sex to someone who, it turns out, does not meet their standard for membership in the club).
Take my brilliant suggestion to remove the bond between sex and commitment, though, and it does two things: First, it frees up both genders to have all the short-term sex to their hearts' content. (Excellent!) Second, it clears the clutter from the pursuit of the long-term relationship and thus makes it more efficient: By allowing girls (alright, and guys) to narrow the pool of long-term mates to only the truly earnest, they don't have to waste time -- and years of "I can fix him" training -- with those who are just saying the right things to get into their pants, again, while kicking and screaming through the rest of the game.
Heck, it would've even freed up more time for interesting conversation, allowing one to skip the hot specimen who only talked about her/his wardrobe/car/like-wow-isn't-that-weird-man?. (Oh, the hours I foolishly flushed away in vacuous conversation).
See, it's all about creating market efficiencies, honest.
Like I said, we were young. And we wanted the sex.
"A KFC manager said the young woman who quit expressed an interest in taking a bath in the sink, but the manager told her not to do it."
I got nothing.
I mean, it kinda reminds me of when I asked my boss if I could work naked -- but I was coming in at 2:30 a.m., when no one else was around. Totally different. Incidentally, our working relationship was never the same.
Meanwhile, you just know somewhere a PR junkie is saving this for her next PowerPoint presentation about "brand identity." [Update: Oh, DO click on the images with the story. I've always wondered if all kids have to learn the hard lesson of posting images of their tomfoolery on Facebook, or if the workplace will eventually change to a resigned norm of, "Meh, who didn't photograph themself bathing in the KFC sink?"]
The (Illinois governor) Blagojevich story is entertaining (and foul, so foul) on so many levels. The unbelievably deranged balls of that guy. Illinois is on a two-governor imprisonment streak.
A sweet primer is at the Daily Beast, in the form of "Who Said It?" A 10-question game where you have to guess whether the quote is (allegedly) Blagoyovich's, or Tony Soprano's. I did not perform well.
As you may have noticed, the site has changed. Sampa, the free-site host, did a version 2 of some sort.
Despite an FAQ that made it sound like allowing one's site to go through v.2 surgery would be okay, there were several flexibilities that surprisingly disappeared with the click of a button. (e.g. I cannot believe sidebars like this one are even narrower than before.)
And I'm told -- miraculously! -- that the conversion cannot be undone. Truth be told, I'm actually quite pissed. But free is free. Sampa has otherwise been good to me.
So I need to sort through site "features" to see how I can make do. Except that I don't have the time at the moment, in the middle of graduate classes and Lighthousehockey.com. (btw, I've removed that Lighthouse RSS feed so that you're not clogged with random Islanders hockey gibberish).
But I promise to touch up the accessories when I get a chance, and return to irregularly scheduled blogging.
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February, 2008