Vaguely Generalizing

I was a bit fed up when I fired off that last blurb, so I didn't think of it at the time, but its original premise--the Internet has made us into retards who can not communicate a point without sounding like we're commenting on YouTube--was what an old teacher of mine would've called a "vague generalization". I never specified who exactly I was talking about. I sounded like I was talking about a large number of people and that I'd witnessed this phenomenon a lot IRL, but really, the only people whom I've ever heard speak this way are members of my own family. So yeah, my own argument is, therefore, BS.

Now, before I go on, I'd like to make clear that the Internet is the most useful and easiest way to spread information there is. It has made it so that there's no such thing as not being able to find or spread information. The Internet gave birth to many wonderful applications. Yay.

But with these positive applications have also come frivolous applications. I guess that's just natural, but still--it's destroying our brains. People my own age, being the first generation raised by the Internet, are exhibiting some disturbing symptoms of--something. I might've been swinging off on a tangent last time, but it sparked a few ideas for me about what I think the Internet is doing to us on the inside. Will vaguely generalize on this a little more later.

Paintings of Websites

The difference between the way an argument ought to be held and the way it typically is held (in these days of trolls and idiots) is very much akin to the difference between the way we view a painting and the way we view a website.

When you’re looking at a painting in museum, especially a huge one with a lot of details, there’s often a central focus point in the image. Even though there are small interesting bits scattered throughout, and you spend time noticing each of them, the painter really wants you to study that central object. And, of course, because nothing exists in a vacuum, the painter wants you to synthesize the central object and peripheral objects into one whole image, because duh, that’s what it is. Now, imagine that the argument you hear is that painting. The argument is itself a whole, meant to be synthesized as such. But also, you should recognize which item in the argument is the central point and which ones are simply details. If you confuse a peripheral detail with the main argument, no matter how brilliant you think your rebuttal is—and most people consider their arguments to be at their peak when replete with prepositional phrases and passive voice—you haven’t rebutted the argument. Sir, you fail. Go home, take a shit, and go to bed.

Now, consider the way you look at a website. We all know—we’ve heard the sound bytes—that ever since the Internet was created and its use became popular, web browsing has decreased our average attention span (even more than TV has). When we’re browsing the Internet, we don’t typically examine a webpage and identify a prominent theme and its extremities; we don’t try to differentiate between the two. Rather, we scan the site and our eyes roll over everything, seeing nothing, until one random thing grabs our attention. From there, we click. From there, we click. From there, we click. We keep clicking, until we’ve come so far from where we started that we forget how we got there. We havne't synthesized the website’s purpose, but a truckload of moshed-together webshite that has nothing to do with what we were originally searching for. This is how so many people argue. We hear something and, already having in our heads that we’re going to refute it (this behavior is most prevalent in people who think they’re smart), we don’t listen to what we hear and we miss the main point. Rather, we hinge on an extremity that has little or nothing to do with the main argument, make that our own central argument, and tell ourselves we’ve refuted our interlocutor. Really, all we've done is run our fucking mouth.

And… I am out of steam. I'm not going to proofread that (*GASP*). I’m not 100% positive “interlocutor” means what I think it means. I need to sleep. Will probably rant more within the next few days.

Check, Please!

Now that I got the self-pity out of my system, I can honestly say I don’t care if homeskillet ever calls me or not. He was hanging all over me all throughout the movie, and we’d only just met that day, so. I think he was the creepy one. At any rate, I’m certainly not calling him, and I’m not afraid I’ll miss anything if I never hear from him again. Next!


However, I need to, I guess, retract my earlier statements. Or maybe not my statements, but my attitude. I made it all sound so serious. It’s not that serious. I’m not that hopeless, and I don’t sit around ruminating on this crap and writing depressing, emo blog entries about it. I waxed depressing about it because I thought I was supposed to, not because I thought it mattered. Then I laughed at myself, because I was completely ridiculous.


Listen, kids: Romance is not a race. You don't accrue Frequent Dater Miles with every swipe of your Love Card. You don't need to buy boyfriends in bulk.


Goodnight.

Boyfriend vs. Puppy

This may be TMI, but I’m pretty sure my breasts have ESP. Tonight at the movie, whenever my date’s hand came dangerously close, my tits knew it. Soon as I sat down in the theater, he snaked his arm around me and told me he likes to cuddle. I didn’t mind too much (although I wouldn’t have said anything even if I did, because I’m shy and insecure and will tolerate a lot up to a certain point). Last time a guy put his arm around me like that, I was eighteen. Yeah, six years ago.

After the movie, in the car, I went to kiss his cheek, but he jumped the gun a bit and kissed me on the mouth. And I said—aloud—“Ew.”

As you can probably tell, I don’t have any dealings with men, at all. All throughout my teen years, boys told me I was ugly and called me names. I learned by the age of thirteen that no one would ever look twice at me. And now, at 24, I’m not the ugly duckling who grew into a swan; I’m not the beautiful invisible girl. I’m the ugly duckling who grew into an ugly duck; I’m the just-plain-invisible girl. I’m not Emily Dickinson, who would hold conversations with her visitors from behind a closed door; I have no visitors and I talk to myself. I’m not the spinning girl on the pavement like Katie Jane Garside; she’s wild and beautiful and I’m no such spectacle. I could say I’m only half a person, but then I’d be able to relate to Morrissey, and I have no such luck. He’s awfully famous; for his incurable depression and funny haircut, if for nothing else. Or maybe he’s depressed because of his funny haircut. But now I’m getting off track. I learned by the age of 13 that no one would ever look twice at me, and now, at 24, that is my truth. No one has ever looked twice at me. In all honesty, I don’t see why anyone should.

So. If I go out with this fellow again, is it just because I think it’ll be a cold day in hell before another man notices that I exist? I mean, I can’t attract men, and how many coworkers have 25 year-old sons? At this point, do I even want relationships? Do I even want to date? Do I even want a boyfriend? Wouldn’t I rather have a puppy? Am I just going through these hoops so that, when I’m 50, I can say that I tried? Do I really give a rat’s ass, or am I just humoring everyone who keeps telling me that I ought to give a rat’s ass?

If I were still seeing my therapist, I do believe she would say that, at the very least, I should want to get laid.

Pretty Ugly

Last time, we left off with my whining about the USA’s fascist beauty standards. When I gripe about the pretty people, I do so fully aware that, if I fit their mold, I wouldn’t be griping, and I probably wouldn’t feel the need to harp on things like how peoples’ self-image suffers, how too much emphasis is placed on outward appearances, and how it’s all fruitless because even the pretty people will become tabouleh when everything’s said and done. It’s a very judgmental point-of-view, and the more you read things I write, you’ll see that sometimes I’m a very judgmental chick.

It’s a culturally conditioned assumption here in the USA that beautiful people don’t have to be smart and that they generally aren’t. They don’t have to be intelligent; they don’t have to have any kind of merit other than their appearance because beauty is highly valuable in our society. You’d be hard pressed to find an unattractive person who doesn’t want to be beautiful, or to find a beautiful person who doesn’t want to maintain herself. Why else would our multi-billion-dollar beauty industry exist? It sure as shit isn’t there to help people cure AIDS, conquer world hunger, or research sustainable clean fuel sources. But is there really a positive correlation between beauty and stupidity? My grimy, cobwebby, cold black heart says there is. But my brain’s fairly sure that intelligence and physical appearance aren’t related.

In Tally’s world, the opposite is true: after the operation, a new pretty’s personality is drastically different. Regardless of what she or he was like as an ugly — no matter how cynical toward New Pretty Town life, no matter how mischievous, how crafty with ugly-tricks — the operation leaves the patient a beautiful airhead. Uglies opens with Tally sneaking into New Pretty Town to visit her best friend Peris, a recent post-op and her best friend, whom she’d been without for months. (Although pretties are allowed to visit Uglyville in the off-chance that they’d want to, uglies aren’t allowed to step foot inside New Pretty Town, hence the Mission Impossible-esque sneaking.) She does find Peris in the party tower where he makes his home, and she’s completely dazzled with his beauty, but she can’t help but notice that he’s not too thrilled to see her. His personality is different; he’s not sarcastic, he’s not ironic like he was before his operation when he used to criticize pretties for their irresponsible, shallow, half-drunk lifestyle. In fact, he’s dressed in black velvet, on his way to a bash, and he tells Tally that they’ll be best friends for life again after she has her operation. Tally sneaks back to Uglyville with a foul aftertaste in her mouth, but she chocks it up to the loneliness of waiting for her operation while all of her friends are already pretty. On her way back to Uglyville, she meets Shay, another ugly.

Eager to find a new friend now that she knows Peris is off-limits until she has her operation, Tally jumps at the chance to be Shay’s BFF. And it comes out soon that, not only does Shay not envy the pretties, she doesn’t want to be one at all. She doesn’t want to be pretty; she likes her own face. She even thinks Tally’s face is alright, and she doesn’t feel the need to gag when she sees another of what society would have her call “ugly”. To Shay, the stupidity factor of beauty is the major deterrent. Nothing is as valuable as her mind, her individuality, her creativity. Tally disagrees. She thinks being a professional party girl in a lit-up party tower every single night is a worthy replacement for the “ugly tricks” and mischief that run rampant in Uglyville. She sees having the operation as a rite of passage that one looks forward to, kind of like graduating high school — never mind that it seems to undo all the book-learning. Tally calls it “growing up”, as if moving to New Pretty Town expands horizons and responsibilities. Like the culturally conditioned assumptions that I bitched about earlier, these are Tally’s culturally conditioned assumptions. She can’t make sense of Shay’s point-of-view because she’s been trained her entire life through her peers, her parents, media, and school to believe just the opposite.

Aside from the large theme of the culturally conditioned assumptions surrounding beauty and self-image, there are a few other things that jumped out at me about Uglies.

1. The specifications of the new face and body that are created during the operation are based on a template for a beautiful person. This template’s features — facial structure and symmetry, eye, nose, and lip size, limb length, etc. — are based on the calculated averages that came from years and years of studies conducted to determine what people considered beautiful. Scientists researched which facial features triggered immediate positive reactions from the study participants, who came from all over the world and all walks of life. Tally frequently analyzes the physiognomy of the pretties around her: their wide eyes signify vulnerability and innocence, the pearly white teeth and full lips, when smiling, are inviting and compelling. She feels an odd tug inside her that draws her towards them. And, what’s more important, she notes that their healthy glow signifies that they’d produce healthy babies. Uglies are taught that, because of the extremely low human population, it’s very important that they reproduce; and that’s where the operation comes in. Who’d want to make babies with a total hag? In Uglies, the inexplicable emotion of love is played down and the instinctual, biological drive to rut like beasts in the field is played up. The operation is intended to assist nature in its course. Yet, it has created a society that hates its natural self. To live life with the face you were born with is wrong. If you keep your natural face, you will never reproduce, because people will look at your natural ugliness and their knee-jerk reaction is that you’ll produce ugly little babies. You must have the operation to become human. Beauty doesn’t occur naturally in humans; you must have this operation or you are just an ugly-for-life, which is something not quite human.

2. There’s an Uglyville, a New Pretty Town, and a Crumblyville, which segregate the citizens by their level of prettiness, but the city containing all three of these towns is unnamed. There are starkly defined boundaries dividing pretty and ugly; if you’re not a pretty, you must be an ugly. One or the other. But to name the city itself would place a border around all three towns, which would undermine the hierarchy create and endanger the uglies’ acceptance of the regime.

To place a large border around something emphasizes that the city is indeed finite, and there is something outside of it. The people in Tally’s city are not remotely curious about what lies beyond the city limits, and are actually scared to think that, in other cities, people may or may not come in different colors or speak different languages from them. And there are not just other cities, but other options: the Smoke, for example, which is a small rebel community inhabited by people who ran from their city to avoid the operation (and where Shay goes when she leaves the city). The purveyors of the pretty regime don’t want their citizens to know that there are other options; especially not the uglies.

As it turns out, Shay is right; the operation really does change a person into an airhead. But it’s not because the post-op is suddenly encouraged to spend as much time as possible having fun. The big secret, and the real purpose of the operation, is to damage the person’s brain in strategic places to create the “pretty personality”. The pretties don’t realize that they’ve changed because they all live with other pretties; they’re all the same. An ugly would notice a difference, and Tally certainly does. She mentions at the beginning of the novel that she and Peris used spy on pretties to make fun of the stupid things pretties say (that is, until Peris became one himself). Now, an ugly is forbidden to enter New Pretty Town; but a pretty may enter Uglyville if he or she chooses. Tally doesn’t see pretties face-to-face very often. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Peris, at the very beginning of the novel, is the only new pretty she’s ever spoken to. The regime ostracizes uglies because they are dangerous to it. They haven’t had their brains messed with, so their perceptions aren’t fucked up. They would notice that something is wrong with the pretties and resist having the operation.



And it’s late again. I don’t feel like typing anymore. Read the book.

(Uglies, written by Scott Westerfeld, is the first of a trilogy. The second installment, Pretties, picks up where Uglies leaves off, with Tally and Shay living in New Pretty Town.)

Fascist Beauty Standards

Right now I’m reading a book called Uglies. It’s set in the future, and the past population (that would be us, guys) has apparently murdered itself through its own stupidity, and is considered barbaric, backwards, and ignorant. Now, the human population is tiny; there isn’t much of a USA anymore, it’s just a landmass with many isolated cities that are cut off from each other by the ruins of the past— burned metal frames that used to be buildings, charred car remains twisted around each other in the streets, absolutely no people—and stretches of wilderness. The cities that have risen to replace the old ones are just little bubbles of society, so insular that the mere idea of leaving one’s own city is tantamount to dropping off the face of the earth. Inside these cities, everything is automated and information technology has grown out of control, infusing all facets of life. Everyone wears a ring through which they can control certain machines or appliances around them with just a word (elevators, for instance). These rings also identify and track them, so they are watched by an unseen, unnamed authority which punishes them for breaking certain arbitrary rules (such as venturing past the limits of the city and into the ruins without permission).

Because the population is so small, it’s very important that people have babies, which requires them to fuck. And, as we all know, that requires some level of physical attraction, and in this society, the underlying biological and psychological motivations in that complicated exchange are prescribed to every boy and girl at age 16. It comes in the form of a The Swan-esque full-body surgical makeover. The bones are carved and ground in some places, while plastic implants are added in others. Any excess fat is permanently removed. The body is elongated if too short, and any sagging muscles are toned through special chemical or electrical therapies. As for the face, the structure is made perfectly symmetrical and the eyes are made larger, the nose smaller, the lips fuller, the cheekbones higher. The teeth are extracted and replaced with bright white ceramic. Last but not least, every inch of skin is sanded off and a new skin is grafted on to replace it. All of these surgical procedures are based on what scientists believe is considered universally attractive to people in all walks of life. Everyone has this surgery; everyone. Anyone who refuses is an ugly-for-life; an outcast. (But nobody ever refuses. Who doesn’t want to be pretty?)

After the surgery, the new pretty moves from Uglyville—where uglies (which are children ages 12 through 16) live in dormitories and attend school without any parental supervision—to New Pretty Town. Instead of attending school, their vocation is to attend one party after another, to dance every night, set off fireworks, and just stand around being pretty. Once they reach a certain age, the new pretties have a second surgery and become “middle pretties” and move to Crumblyville, where they get married and have children, or “littlies”. The littlies are sent to live in Uglyville at the age of 12, and the cycle begins anew. After a third surgery, the middle pretties become “late pretties”, and once the late pretties have exhausted science’s options for life extension, they finally kick the bucket.

Our heroine, Tally, is a few months shy of her sixteenth birthday, and she’s x-ing off the days. She recently lost her childhood friend, Peris, when he had his operation and relocated to New Pretty Town. Although he said they’d be friends for life, he’s not shown much inclination to keep that promise. Who’d want to be friends with an ugly? They’re just too damn ugly. But, one night, when Tally sneaks into New Pretty Town to see Peris, he promises that they’ll be friends again when she becomes pretty. She’s bound and determined, now—she wants to be pretty so much she can taste it. But on that same night, she meets Shay, a girl who doesn’t want to be pretty. She defies logic, she defies tradition, and she defies biology by being content with her appearance. Rather, she values her individuality and imagination—something she fears will go bye-bye if she becomes a cookie-cutter pretty like Peris and other denizens of New Pretty Town. So, Shay does the unthinkable: she decides she won’t have the operation, and runs away. Now, the unnamed and unseen authority watching everything makes itself known in the form of Special Circumstances, a government agency responsible for quashing any resistance to the city’s regime. Special Circumstances gives Tally an ultimatum: she can either help them find Shay , or she will be an ugly-for-life herself. (DUN-DUN-DUN!!)

Uglies is technically a young adult novel, which is a term I don’t really like because of its negative connotations. “Young adult novel” connotes a book which has little or nothing worth thinking about, it’s just for fun, there’s no meat, there’s no real substance, and it’s written shiteously. At least, that is what someone with literati leanings might say about a young adult novel. Really, a young adult novel can be every bit as cerebral and as well-written as any adult novel; the only real difference between the two is the presentation. A young adult novel has larger text, more white space, and flashier cover art. I’m only about a quarter of the way through Uglies, but so far it is extremely weighty, dealing with the issues of individuality and body image in the onslaught of merciless beauty standards enabled by medical technology abuses and enforced by overbearing governments. Sounds sci-fi, but it’s our world on the other side of the mirror.

I found myself wishing I lived in a world where we’re transformed into pretties at the age of 16. And that’s sort of the point of this little exercise in exaggeration. Images of beauty infuse all media and become hardwired into our brains, until we look at each other and think, “God, she’s ugly.” But she’s not ugly; she’s normal. Only, she doesn’t match the preconceived notions of beauty that we just fucking can’t get out of our brains. We strive desperately to be like the beautiful people we see on TV and in magazines. We don’t shape our beauty standards; the beauty industry shapes us. Teen magazines like ElleGirl often attack the issue of body image, and they claim that a healthy, full figure wins their vote when readers call them out for featuring rail-thin waif-women in their fashion spreads. They continue publishing photos of stick girls because they don’t want their beauty image to reflect their readers; they want their readers to try to imitate the images in the magazine. It makes my brain cry real tears to admit it, but I still want to be like those magazine girls, even though I know it’s all a crock of shit. The only real difference between Uglies and the USA is that here, our fascist beauty standards aren’t actually enforced by law, but by popular culture, which often has the force of law when it comes to shaping our beliefs and behavior.

Uglies sets you up for a huge change in Tally’s take on life from the very beginning, because the writer knows that, despite being bred to starve ourselves and squeeze into skinny jeans, we’re also inoculated with the belief that inner beauty trumps outer beauty. We’re invited to believe ourselves superior to Tally because she mindlessly swallows the pretty regime, and we know instinctively that she’ll have to redeem herself somehow before it’s over. What was the point of her meeting Shay, what was the point of her being shown that she can choose to be whatever she wants regardless of what the regime says, if she’s just going to go ahead and do what she’d already intended to do from the start?

There are a few interesting things that struck me as I read, but I’ll talk about it later, because it’s past my bedtime.


Good night.

Bug Wars

This is me complaining about bugs. They are nasty. I hate them. They enjoy invading my apartment.

It started with cockroaches when I first moved in. And I’m talking about gigantic American mutant cockroaches, not the little wimpy German ones. The first one I saw was after I’d lived here a few weeks. I rolled out of bed to get ready for work and went into the bathroom to make myself look presentable. A second or two after I turned the light on, I heard this scratching noise coming from directly above. At first I thought it might be a bird on the roof. I noticed something odd in the mirror: there was something moving in the overhead light. I turned to look at it, and I could see through the milky plastic that there was a huge, HUGE, probably two-inch-long cockroach spazzing out in the light cover. It was trapped in there, so I didn’t scream or anything, but I stared until it stopped moving (fried by the lightbulb). Since I’m only five feet tall and I don’t have a step ladder or anything tall enough to stand on to reach the light myself, I had to call the leasing office to have a maintenance guy come over and get the thing out. I haven’t seen another one that enormous inside my apartment since then, although I did see one crawling on the ceiling in the vestibule some time later (ew).

The next time I encountered a roach in my place, I wasn’t as calm and collected as I was the first time. This time, my dad was over hanging curtains, so he got to witness the whole thing. The roach was in the dining room lying on its back as if dead. I bent to pick it up with a paper towel, and it woke up and started crawling around on the towel. I screamed bloody murder, probably freaked the shit out of my neighbors, started running, got about two feet before I fell over a chair, scrambled up, got another two feet before I tripped and fell down again. Screaming the whole time. (The second time I fell, I stayed down.) My dad just looked at me and said, “Krista Michelle, it’s a cockroach.” I think he ended up killing the little bastard for me. I haven’t seen another roach since.

Then it was fleas. About a month and a half ago, I was sitting in the dining room, tap-tapping on the laptop as I’m wont to do when bored, when I felt a tickle and saw a flea frolicking around my arm. Now, I’m more familiar with fleas than I would like to be. When I was a kid, between the ages of 8 and 11, one of my dogs had a flea problem. For some reason, the fleas liked me best of everyone, because I was covered in bites but I don’t remember my brother or my parents complaining about them. It was hell. There were tiny little black things (I’m guessing flea eggs or something) all over the dog and on my bedspread, and I was getting bitten all the time. I itched constantly. Apparently, since it only affected me and the dog, the parents felt it wasn’t necessary to do anything about it. Anyway, when I found the monster flea hopping up my arm that night about a month ago, I thought it was probably the biggest flea I’d ever seen. It was about the size of three normal fleas rolled together. At work, I joked that I didn’t have fleas, I had just one flea that ate all the other fleas. I don’t have a pet, and I haven’t seen any dogs around. I’m guessing someone in my building has a housecat and they’ve let it get fleas. Fortunately, my flea problem was short lived this time around; after about three weeks, I wasn’t being bitten anymore, and I didn’t see any hopping around. Just to be safe, I still called in the flea sprayers last week. Since then, I haven’t seen one or been bitten, so I’m hoping that epoch is over.

The most recent installment in my epic battle against insects started just a few days ago with an insurgence of flies. After the zombie roach incident (in which I almost died trying to get away from it), a friend gave me an electric flyswatter for Christmas. Best Christmas gift ever. Unfortunately, I never had an opportunity to use it, because I hadn’t seen any bugs. I wished I would get a chance to use it, because I thought it would be cool. Careful what you wish for. Over the last two days, I have killed nearly 20 flies (I shit you not). Every time I think I’ve got the last one, I notice another one. They like to buzz around the lightbulbs over my bathroom mirror. Every few hours, I roll my blinds up to see if there are any around the window—another favorite place of theirs. It’s not like they’re here eating my trash; my apartment is clean. I clean the whole place once a week. Today I called my dad and complained, and he said it’s probably the change in the weather that’s brought them on. Does this mean I’ll be killing flies all summer?

At least they’re not scorpions.