because every time my kid asks me a question I don’t know how to answer, I’m just going to pretend the question was rhetorical.
“Dad, what does irony mean?”
“I know, right?”
“Dad, what does the president do?”
“Ha! Exactly.”
“Dad, are you drunk?”
“Man, you’re telling me. Society, right? Am I right? … Society.”
“
ACCORDING TO ARISTOPHANES, there were originally three sexes: the Children of the Moon (who were half male and half female), the Children of the Sun (who were fully male), and the Children of the Earth (who were fully female). Everyone had four legs, four arms, and two heads and spent their days in blissful contentment.
Zeus became jealous of the humans’ joy, so he decided to split them all in two. Aristophanes called this punishment the Origin of Love. Because ever since, the Children of the Earth, Moon, and Sun have been searching the globe in a desperate bid to find their other halves.
Aristophanes’s story, though, is incomplete. Because there was also a fourth sex: the Children of the Dirt. Unlike the other three sexes, the Children of the Dirt consisted of just one half. Some were male and some were female and each had just two arms, two legs, and one head.
The Children of the Dirt found the Children of the Earth, Moon, and Sun to be completely insufferable. Whenever they saw a two-headed creature walking by, talking to itself in baby-talk voices, it made them want to vomit. They hated going to parties and when there was no way to get out of one they sat in the corner, too bitter and depressed to talk to anybody. The Children of the Dirt were so miserable that they invented wine and art to dull their pain. It helped a little, but not really. When Zeus went on his rampage, he decided to leave the Children of the Dirt alone. ‘They’re already fucked,’ he explained.
I feel like I’m really nailing it tonight.
not sorry.
Ugh, no. Don is the one whose hair is full of secrets. You philistines don’t get it.
(That said, I’m super-glad to learn this blog exists.)
Sing us into the week, Allison Williams!
MAD MEN TONIGHT! This jpeg is incredibly silly, but as they say, it’s a poor cook who can’t please himself.
I posted this a year and a half ago for the season four premiere and I think it got like one LIKE. I’m not going to lie; this deserved more.
Also a year and a half ago for the season four premiere I had a big party. I invited all my friends and we dressed up like it was the sixties. I played sixties music and I baked two pies, from scratch, because baking pies from scratch seemed like a vaguely sixties-ish thing to do.
Then we watched the episode and I just wanted everyone to get out of my house.
I love this show. I love how it makes me feel sad and alone. It worms its way into my heart and brain like no show ever has. Above all else, I believe Mad Men is about loneliness, the tender isolation that is the center of the human condition, and the things people do to not feel so lonely. The writer Brian Doyle, in one of my favorite pieces of writing Joyas Voladoras, wrote:
We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.
We can argue about Don Draper, his vices and virtues, but in the end, we love him, we care about what happens to him, we want him to find peace, not because he’s a good human being (he isn’t), but because he, like us, is alone.
So, after posting this last year, I went to Margaret’s boyfriend Jeff’s place to watch the season five premiere. After the episode was over I went home. Margaret called me the next day: “Are you okay? You left right after the show ended. Everyone thought it was really bizarre. Are you mad at me?”
I’m going to another friend’s house to watch the Mad Men premiere tonight and my goal this year is to not have the show affect me so much that all my friends think I’m weird and antisocial and insist on bringing the incident up every time we get into an argument and they need evidence of how weird and antisocial I am.
That said, I just got an email from Jeff (not Margaret’s Jeff, different Jeff, since when do I have so many friends named Jeff?) saying he hasn’t watched the show in a while and may need some catching up tonight, and I swear to God if he doesn’t wait until the commercial to ask, “Who’s that guy? What’s happening?” I may have to bite my own fist to avoid completely overreacting and ruining several friendships.
I didn’t love everything about season five, but I loved how surprising it was, how just when I thought I’d figured out how the show zigged, it skipped zagging and went straight to zogging. For a show supposedly built on the premise that people don’t change, it’s amazing how much the stories evolve from season to season. It’s hard to imagine an actor on any other show giving an answer like this in an interview:
HitFix: Is the process different now because Betty’s a character you’ve been playing now for six years?
January Jones: No, because I feel like she’s so ever-evolving and it feels almost like a different character each season, because she’s constantly changing. I don’t feel like I know her well enough to just take for granted that I’ll know what to do. I really see her as a real person in that she is changing and trying to do different things. Whether it’s physical or emotional, I feel like she’s just always different, which is great for me.
It’s great for me too, January.
Also, it is amazing to me that the “THAT’S WHY HIS HAIR IS SO BIG” jpeg at the top of this post still hasn’t taken the world wide web by storm. Do you guys not get it? It’s a Mean Girls reference. But with a picture from Mad Men. Come on, Internet, do your thing.
Is it me? Do I not understand how Internet works? If you had told me that a Mad Men/Mean Girls mashup macro couldn’t muster up more than a dozen likes after two years of just sitting out on a Web Page I’d say you were insane. And yet here we are.
Another haunting surprise.
THING THAT I HATE OF THE DAY!
I have never — and I emphasize, never — in my actual real life met a person who became an accidental viral hit because they said something on the news that got autotuned or they got videotaped doing something embarrassing by a random cellphone, and yet this happens to TV characters ALL THE TIME.
In the last year, I’ve probably seen more fictional viral autotune remixes on TV shows than actual autotune remixes on the internet. I understand that things happen to our favorite fictional characters that would never actually happen to us or our friends in real life — that’s the point, of course — but the sheer deluge of this one gag in recent years has crossed over from exhausting to enraging.
The trope has become lazy shorthand for When-It-Rains-It-Pours-For-Our-Humiliated-Protagonist, but what irks me most is the inherent backpattiness of a writer on a TV show saying, Hey, that thing that I completely made up is so outrageous and hilarious that if it happened in real life, it would totally go viral.
No. It wouldn’t. Most things don’t.
Dance us into the week, cast of Sweet Charity!
and the police police police that sometimes (albeit rarely) police the police police:
Q: If police police, who polices the police?
A: Police police police police.
Q: If police police police police, are the police police themselves policed by police police police?
A: No, in addition to policing police, police police also police police police.
Q: But isn’t that a conflict of interest for the police police? Wouldn’t an outside investigation of police police be more appropriate?
A: In certain extreme circumstances, specially trained police police police are in fact brought in to police police police, but this is very rare.
Q: When the police police police do police police police, which police police do the police police police police?
A: Police police police police the police police that the police police police police.
Q: Can you be more specific?
A: I’m not authorized to to say anything past the fact that police police police police police police police police police police.
Q: But what about police police police police? Which police police police do they police?
A: There’s no such thing as police police police police. Don’t be ridiculous.
Q: But let’s say there was…
A: Okay, fine. If, hypothetically, for some reason, police police police police policed police police police, police police police police would police police police police police police police police policed.
Singin’ In The Rain — Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds celebrate March 24th by wishing each other “Good Morning.”
Debbie Reynolds was 19 when she made this movie (Gene Kelly was over twice as old) and she had little dancing experience — her background was as a gymnast. After shooting the “Good Morning” routine, her feet were bleeding. Years later, she was quoted as saying that “Singin’ in the Rain and childbirth were the two hardest things I ever had to do in my life.”
Dance us into the week, Debbie!
10) Fear that Doctor will find something wrong in me, will have to operate!
9) Fear I do not understand own health coverage and will have to give all my money!
8) Fear I do not understand own health coverage and person at front desk will think I am stupid, later tell someone I am stupid!
7) Fear that other patients in waiting area will make me sick — OR SAD!!!
6) Fear that while examining me, people (Doctor, Nurse, etc.) will think I smell gross and/or look weird!
5) Fear that Doctor will make me go to see other Doctor! (Here we go again!)
4) Fear I will have to fill out form I do not understand, will do it wrong!
3) Fear that Nurse will ask probing questions about sex life and when answer honestly, Nurse will think I am lame!
2) Fear that when making appointment, will have to talk to somebody, on phone!
1) Fear that Doctor will be mad at me for some reason and make a mean mad face!
A Freaks and Geeks lullaby, by Allie Goertz.
The finale of The Wonder Years takes place on July 4th, 1973, and aired May 12th, 1993, a difference of 19 years, 10 months, and 8 days, the same difference as between the airing of that episode and today. In other words, any given episode of The Wonder Years is now at least as old as the era it depicted. In other words, if you ever watched a first-run episode of The Wonder Years and thought, “Gee, that was a long time ago,” it was at least that long ago from now that you were watching that episode.
At 7:35 A.M, you lay your tired body on mine
before peeling off, like a slow band-aid.
At 8:40 you sprint home and make instant coffee.
At 9:45 we finally drink it, cold.
I finish your leftover half.
By 10:50 you are already breathless.
I live for every time we overlap.
When 11:55 comes I spend the entire minute convincing you to stay.
You never do.
By noon I put my hands on your shoulders and say, “Baby,
you’re getting thin. All this running in circles and barely sitting down to eat.”
At 1:05 you tell me that while you were gone,
15,300 babies were born.
At 2:10 you don’t say a word,
just come in and kiss me for sixty seconds straight.
At 3:15 we sit quiet, listening to rain falling everywhere
in the world at once: all 15,000 tons.
At 4:20 we pull a little from the tight joint I keep behind your ear.
You do not inhale.
At 5:25 you meet me for happy hour.
My neck already salted, a lime wedged in my teeth,
a shot of tequila sitting on the bar.
At 6:30 I hear the ticking.
I count your heartbeat like seconds between thunderclaps.
By 7:35 I can see you in the distance,
each second a tease until you drape over me.
We always love quick and you never let me hold you.
I dream of drinking you through a straw.
At 8:40 you watch my beard grow 0.00027 of an inch.
At 9:45 we do not speak.
Too many people have died since we last met.
At 10:50 we pray for a meteor,
at least a clumsy kid to spill sugar in our gears.
11:55 is my favorite.
We’re only apart for mere minutes.
But at midnight you’ll apologize sixty times
because it will always be like this.
At 1:04 A.M. I am already sleeping.
It’s exhausting loving someone
who is constantly running away.
— Megan Falley, “What the Hour Hand Said to the Minute Hand”
(via -sam-i-am)
(Source: oofpoetry)
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