Thought That Came Unbidden

I’ve been doing the Big Clean at my house. The excuse is that I have house guests coming at the end of next week. The reality is that I’m just sick to the point of low-boiling anger of all the clutter and mess. I like to be able to put my hands on the DVD I want to watch on a given night, or find my baby name book. Order is, in some ways, as comforting as it is illusory. This is not to say, though, that I’m a firm believer in the “everything in its place” theory of life: after all, if you can never leave a magazine on the dining room table or the blanket unfolded on the couch because you staggered upstairs at 1am after falling asleep in front of the TV because you were just going to “rest your eyes during the commercials” you aren’t really living in a home, you’re living in a copy of Martha Stewart Living or the Pottery Barn catalogue.

As a result of the Big Clean there has been a lot of sorting of “piles” and a lot of recycling of magazines, and a lot of realizing that yes, I’m going to have to do some shredding. So far I have yet to find the holy grail of office supplies – diamond or cross-cut shredder that will take a credit card offer unopened – for less than $200, and yes, I am that cheap, for that kind of money I’ll spend the extra 45 seconds to open the envelope and take the stuff out, which is why “finish shredding” is on the list of things to do before the end of next week. And while I was working on finishing shredding I ran across an envelope from a financial conglomerate which has issued me one of the many credit cards I hold. Yes, it was the annual privacy policy and terms of service announcement.

Giant National Bank helpfully informed me that I have options to control how they share my information both outside and inside their vast network of financial institutions. They also sent me a lovely quad fold brochure that details in Q&A form my privacy policy options and a much denser and less user friendly sheet detailing the change in service to the Visa card I have from them.

Titled “AMENDMENTS TO YOUR AGREEMENT” (weird capitalization, bolding, and misplaced commas all theirs) this brochure, in Arial 8pt if you please, states the following about the “DEFAULT RATE” :

The “Default Rate” section below replaces any provisions in your agreement or any subsequent amendments regarding “FINANCE CHARGES for Late Payment”, “Default Rate”, or “Closed Account Rate”.

Default Rates. Your APRs also may vary if you are in default under this agreement for any of the following reasons:

• We do not receive, for any payment that is owed on this account or any other account or loan with us, at least the minimum payment due by the date and time due.
• You fail to make a payment on any loan to any of our related companies when due.
• You exceed your credit line on this account.
• You make a payment to us that is not honored by your bank.

If any of these events occurs, we may increase the APRs (including any promotional APR) on all balances (excluding overdraft advances) up to a maximum of the default rate stated in the Rates and Fees Table.

The rate listed as the current APR in the Rates and Fees Table/Table of Interest Charges: 32.24%.

Or, a variable rate of “The Prime Rate* plus up to 23.99%” (“*Estimated variable APRs above are based on the 8.25% Prime Rate on August 31, 2006.” (clearly I need to look at these things more often))

I can almost get behind the idea that they have a right to raise my rate if I don’t pay my bill. After all, they are taking a risk by extending credit to me, letting me use their money (which isn’t really their money since they are Giant National Bank and are using the money from their depositors to finance their credit card business in a race against time in the hopes that they will get paid before enough depositors come to claim their deposits…it’s sort of the macro economic equivalent of robbing Peter to pay Paul).

But 32.34% APR if my minimum payment, or even my payment in full, shows up one day late in their office? Makes me want to send Giant National Bank the page out of Webster’s that defines usury.

What I really like is bullet point number two: “You fail to make a payment on any loan to any of our related companies when due.” That means that if I have a car loan or a mortgage with Giant National Bank if my payment on that is late they have a right to jack up the rate on my credit card even if I have been paying that faithfully and on time.

This plus all the “holiday” commercials that we have been seeing since Halloween got me to thinking about consumption and reminded me of Adbusters. Every year Adbusters declares the two days following Thanksgiving in the U.S. (Friday in the U.S., Saturday internationally) “Buy Nothing Day.” According to their statistics one fifth of the world’s population consumes 80% of its resources. Seems a little out of balance, don’t you think?

Take a look at Adbusters classic :30 commercial for Buy Nothing Day or its new, geeked out cousin provided by someone outside the organization (below) while I think about this: the “AMENDMENTS TO YOUR AGREEMENT” pamphlet also says that “The following changes will apply unless you choose not to accept them.” I think this year when I get my annual mailing on this I’m going to call the toll-free number and see what happens when I choose not to accept these changes. In the mean time, I plan on doing yard work on “black Friday” instead of showing up at 4am for the “door buster sale.” I’ve got enough stuff anyway.

There has never been any question that the war in Iraq is not only a bad fucking idea but also unjust as hell: let’s see, first we give Saddam Hussein money in the 1970s and 1980s and provide him a nice, cushy margin to create his own little fiefdom where he can torture and kill his enemies with impunity, then we decide for some reason that it behooves us to destroy his government and try to “build democracy.” The layers of bullshit – from Irag = 9/11 through WMDs and right on into “nation building” – are so thick it is going to take historians decades to find an even vaguely coherent path through them.

It really doesn’t much matter to me at this point. It’s official: my niece is being deployed next July for “not more than 400 days.” Did I mention that her enlistment is up in August 2008?

Yes, I know, if you don’t want to fight in a war don’t join the service. I get that. No, there’s no draft or anything, not at all.

So while I have opposed the war all along for purely rational reasons – Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11 (do we even deserve “payback” for that?), we have no business interfering in the matters of another nation state (of course, to take that to the next step we’d need to stop propping up dictators all over the world), and after completely subverting the Constitution we’re certainly not qualified to tell anyone else how to build a republic – now the reason why it needs to stop as soon as possible is personal.

And the real kick in the ass is that what I can do to stop it remains exactly the same: absolutely nothing.

Like most people with a desk job, I eat nearly a third of my meals at the office. Since my tastebuds weren’t actually shot off in the war I find it nice to have access to some of the same spicing and saucing options at work as I have available to me at home.

Salt and pepper shakers in convenient sizes for use at the office are available in most grocery stores; you don’t even have to buy brand name as the store will usually provide a house brand. But perusing the offerings over the weekend I’ve developed a sneaking suspicion that the food industry in America is trying to kill us with salt.

Take Campbell’s Soups. Familiar as both product and art (though art because they are familiar but that’s another down the rabbit hole discussion), a serving of Campbell’s condensed tomato soup has 710mg of sodium per serving. If a serving is 1/2 a cup and each can is about 2.5 servings you’re looking at 1,775mg of sodium per can. Though you’ll be hard pressed to find them (I had to dig out this obscure, undated articled on the FDA’s web site) guidelines for Daily Recommended Values on sodium list 2,400mg/day for an adult consuming 2,000 calories.

Which means with one can of soup eats up 74% of your suggested daily intake of sodium (84% if you make it with 1% milk (124mg sodium/cup x approximately 2 cups per can)). The reduced sodium tomato soup isn’t much better at 1,275 mg/can.

I know, prepared soups are notoriously high in sodium and I picked this example partly because the nutritional data were easy to come by, but I also picked it because I like soup and I’m forced to wonder if there’s already so much sodium in prepackaged food that we should all be wandering around ready to burst a blood vessel why is it possible for me to get double salt shakers but not double pepper shakers?

I think about words a lot. Not an unusual state of affairs for a writer. Words, language, and the use and abuse of language stir in me emotions that I’m sure many would feel are inappropriate for something so commonplace. But to me Americans treat our language in much the same way we treat our automobiles: we disregard the great power it has to influence, for good or bad, and treat it as if it was a toy. Every now and then, though, I run into a word or a turn of phrase that makes me laugh right out loud because of its sheer cleverness, the utter aptness with which the author has applied the language. That’s happened to me twice recently, though only one of them is a portmanteau.

fauxmo: acting homosexual for effect in opposition to your usual or true sexual orientation.

I found this word, which is also listed in the Urban Dictionary with several slightly different definitions than the one above, in an essay titled “The Evolution of the Prime-Time Lesbian Clinch” by Diane Anderson-Marshall (originally published in Bitch, Winter 2004; reprinted in BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine). Anderson-Marshall’s critique is worth reading if only because it highlights the gap between how lesbian sexuality is portrayed in the media and how “…real, live lesbians are treated in society and how uncomfortable their presence still makes straight viewers.” Even though it’s now three years old, it carries even more weight in an environment that has accepted the women of The L Word as the defacto standard for how lesbians look and act and straight society’s disdain for any woman that doesn’t look like she has stepped off the pages of Cosmo has completely entrenched itself in the “lesbian community.”

Part of the reason this amused me so is because my discovery of this word, which the Urban Dictionary applies primarily to men because, I think, “homo” is still an epithet that lives largely in the male sphere, came on the heels of Slate.com’s excellent critique of what it means to be a celebrity near the end of 2007 and how that is illustrated by MTV’s newest reality show A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila.

Taking his cue from an earlier Time magazine article on the titular star of the show that asked “Does she represent the triumph of a new democratic starmaking medium or its crass exploitation for maximum personal gain?” writer Troy Patterson focuses almost accidentally on the solipsism of the modern age highlighting the disconnect in a world that revolves entirely around the “self” where the “self” is mediated and crafted, sometimes completely, for performance purposes (after all, if the “self” is the only thing that exists, for whom are all these people performing?). Patterson writes,

Last night, the dating show A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila (MTV, Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET) arrived to offer a reply [to Time Magazine’s question]. “Crass exploitation,” it giggled, continuing, “Duh!”

In a twist on all those stodgy televised courtship tournaments, A Shot at Love sets 16 men and 16 women in pursuit of the heroine’s affections. Yes, Tila is proud to call herself bisexual. No, I’m not holding my breath in expectation that she’ll win an award from GLAAD. But far be it from me to question the passions that stir Tila’s heart and loins. I’ll leave that to You, the collective author of Wikipedia and its ilk, who has coined the term “MySpace bisexual.” The recreational lexicographers at UrbanDictionary.com bring the utmost delicacy to defining the term: “A girl who makes out with other slutty chicks at parties and then claims to be bisexual because it’s trendy to say so and gets people’s attention on myspace.”

– A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila: The bisexual MySpace star has a dating show on MTV., Troy Patterson, Slate.com, Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007, at 5:45 PM ET

Unlike “beer queer,” its decades older predecessor, “MySpace bisexual” like “fauxmo” captures the idea of same-sex attraction as performance or a means to achieving another end that is inherently unrelated to the expressed sexuality. But it does something that neither of the other two terms do: seemingly it applies only to women.

Since performance sexuality predates myspace by almost a decade – see Roseanne Barr’s ratings grabbing lip lock with Mariel Hemingway in 1994 – what does the presence of a term that seems to apply only to female sexuality say about both language and sexuality in a world where language seems to be normalizing to the masculine (what else, after all, can you call the acceptance in public discourse of “you guys” to refer to a mixed sex group and “gay” to refer to both male and female homosexuals)?

I’m not sure I have any answers but I do know that I’ll be listening more critically from now on.

Like many of his projects of late, Vanilla Sky was essentially a vanity piece for Tom Cruise. Disregard the fact that it was a remake, which oddly co-starred Penelope Cruz reprising her role from the original film, and look instead at the fact that both the plastic mask and the disfiguring makeup Cruise sports through much of the film is the facial equivalent of a fat suit (“look, he really can act instead of just being pretty and strutting around! Oh, the novelty, but I’m reassured because there he is in flashback all naturally handsome.”) Despite these things like most films this one has at least one scene in it that will resonant for someone. For me that scene in one in which David Aames proclaims that he is a pleasure delayer, that he gets more enjoyment out of delaying pleasure than he often gets out of the event or action itself. Why does this resonate? Because I think that to a certain extent we are all pleasure delayers.

There’s an empty, gravel-filled lot on the back side of the strip mall where my local chain grocery store squats. Bordering this lot are the elevated tracks for one of our tertiary subway lines and a building that was once a bank but is now a Super Wash whose contribution to local culture is the constant smell of fabric softener. Several of us who have been around the area for roughly forever worried when Metro put in the subway line; adding those tracks cut that vacant lot in half. We wondered, worried, pondered, and some of us shook our heads sadly fearing that the lot would be too small to accommodate any of the traveling carnivals routinely hired by local groups as a fundraiser.

A couple of years went by during which we suffered the lack of Ferris Wheel rides and our blood grease levels dropped due to decreased funnel cake and corn dog consumption but then one summer a small carnival appeared. True, it was mostly rides for the under 42″ tall set but there were games, the ubiquitous giant slide, and yes, funnel cake. There is, in fact, a carnival set up on that very spot right now.

I visited this carnival on Sunday about an hour after they opened when the number of carnies outnumbered the paying customers and in many ways it was no where near as enjoyable as it would have been if the place had been packed to the edges with people. True, I got to walk on to the Ferris Wheel and got an extra long ride because, well, it’s not like the operator had people waiting. Yes, I got not only my own car on the Scrambler but I even got my own wing there were so few takers for the ride.

And then there were the games. OK, so I didn’t manage to shoot out the whole red star on the target but I got two chances to try without feeling pressured. And if I’d wanted to there I could have had a 50/50 shot at winning the cutest little duck at the clown race game (hit the target in the clown’s mouth with your water gun (let’s not get into the implications of that), first one to raise the hat to the top wins). But something about it all left me feeling sort of hollow. It wasn’t until I thought about it later that I realized: I didn’t really have to work for any of my fun.

There was no wait in line, no build of anticipation watching whether or not the people in front of me were having a good time or stumbling off the Samurai and barfing (I swear the Kanji on the sign next to the cartoonish, stereotypical drawing of a Japanese warrior must have said “you will be brandished and inverted” because damn if that wasn’t just what the ride did). There was, in sort, no time for my imagination to build up the experience up. No time to anticipate what it would be like, invest the experience with potential. Each ride, each game, each experience simply was what it was, no more, no less.

True, it is possible to build things up too much, to make them so grand in your imagination that the actual experience has no chance of living up to your expectations (take your first sexual experience or any four year-old’s first sighting of Mickey Mouse at Disney World as examples; neither lives up to what we imagine it will be). This is not to say that being handed something doesn’t have its pleasures; just ask Paris Hilton which is better having to work for your fortune or being born with it.

It is possible, I think, to enjoy experiences you don’t have to work for but is it possible to value them?

Isn’t it possible that human beings require some minimum investment in an event or experience, that we have to work for it even a little bit, for it to be a truthly worthwhile experience?

Just some things to ponder while I wait my turn for the fun house.