Another victory for peer pressure and the internet time-suck: I joined Formspring over here, where you ask questions of people and they answer them. I don’t know if there’s any information you’re really looking to extract from me, but if so, fire away.
Horrifying commercial #4,296.
Every day I spend too much time looking at Craigslist postings for part-time jobs and writing gigs. Most are disappointing and predictable and non-profit-canvassing-related. But today I discovered the Hair Fairies.
We are the only full service head lice removal salon in LA, NY, SF and Chicago dedicated to safely and effectively removing these pesky parasites in a clean kid friendly environment.
The pay is real solid — $13/hour plus tips. But as much as I enjoyed summer camp as a kid (and not being stuck in the nurse’s office with a creepy white-haired lady smelling like my grandma’s fireplace picking through my head with a sharp plastic comb), I don’t think I’ll be applying.
I had the fortunate occasion to overhear both of these gems today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A mom to her 4-year-old boy in the Africa & Americas galleries: Joey, listen to me, all right? There are some places in the world where people aren’t ashamed of showing their penises.
A mom to her 8-year-old girl, on Sol Lewitt’s 13/3 sculpture: You could build that with your Jenga, couldn’t you?
I also saw two different security guards leaning against walls taking naps — perhaps to lull passersby into a false sense of security about their embarrassing snippets of conversation. Very clever.
“These athletic pants boldly proclaim just where she stands by pointing out that ‘True Love Waits’ in a large screen print on the front and back of these pants.” Where it really counts!
But these might actually sell — as Gawker reports, we are statistically in an age of fewer sluts. Is it only a matter of time before they roll out the Abercrombie for Abstinence collection? “Boys want to buy me promise rings” and “My pastor wouldn’t approve of you” stretched across pubescent virgin humps? Yeah, that’ll keep it in their drawstringed “athletic pants.”
I kind of wish true love would just wait for mom to peruse the hair conditioners so “she” can stuff some Kmart condoms into her school bag.
Every other day I read something about how my generation is the most self-centered and superficial, like, ever. The youngs are easy scapegoats for our cultural problems (or “quirks” if you’re PC like that). They always have been, and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say they probably always will be. So how is it every generation seems to forget that as soon as they turn 30?
I’ve been kind of ruminating for the past week on this Radar piece by Robert Lanham (author of the Hipster Handbook) waiting for some self-hating epiphany. But.. nope!
Lanham’s thesis is basically that Generation X had it really hard and everyone was really mean to them, and that Generation Y (by his definition, anyone born between 1982 and 2002) comparatively gets away with cultural murder.
Sure, Generation X survived AIDS, Reagan, the Cold War, Tipper Gore, and A Flock of Seagulls, but those adversities, suggest Strauss and Howe, pale in comparison to what Millennials face today. Consider the stress of having to juggle a 30-hour work week while simultaneously maintaining Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr accounts. It’s enough to make your head spin! And maybe the Millennials never faced Hitler’s forces on the beaches of Normandy, but had they been around in 1944 (and had the technology existed), you can bet they would have blogged about it.
Yeah, so would the Gen-Xers, considering they were the ones who started blogging in the first place. There seems to be a dark, plaid-flannel cloud of bitterness over Lanham’s half-assed arguments. Yes, TIME published a nasty article about Generation X in the 90s that probably hurt a lot of teenaged feelings. But they pulled the same thing fifteen years later with “Twixters,” the January 2005 cover story about twentysomethings balking at traditional rites of passage. It’s not Generation Y, Generation X or even just Americans — it’s a huge cultural shift in developed nations from Japan to Italy.
Gen-X heralded that shift; Gen-Y is only picking up where they left off. And no, Lanham, it ain’t always pretty. Our public image, thanks to the availability of candid photos online, is way douchier than Gen-X’s ever was (see above), plus we’re all unemployed and debt-ridden from college. It’s only fitting that we’d waste all our time on the Web sites that Gen-Xers created for us. I guess my question is, what do you expect from a generation of kids who learned what a blowjob was from Bill Clinton’s televised impeachment hearings and who only have hazy memories pre-GWB (who you jerks elected by the way, thx)?
Lindsay Robertson at Videogum brings extremely important news: Greg Pheasant, the sometimes-loveable, mostly-hateable inexplicably scab-faced, dirt-biking chicken-decapitating teen bully from last fall’s controversial Kid Nation, got a haircut (!!), and now he’s looking to make some extra scratch by selling his greasy locks on eBay to fund a trip to Australia. From the looks of his obsessively repetitive MySpace comments, there will be fierce competition. Maybe he could turn this into a side business like Jared’s souvenir Bonanza necklaces.
Either way, I’m glad to see Greg is still making himself relevant! I don’t know why there wasn’t more sustained hype around this show. Despite the Double Dare challenges, it was a cute and sincere portrait of Gen-Y middle America (there were noticeably few city folk).
And the drama! Who wants to watch the boring Hills when there are 12-year-olds running from dust storms and burning themselves with hot oil? CBS could probably charge another batch of kids for the New Mexico faux ghost town ‘Nation experience as a summer camp; I assume that would get them around at least some child labor laws…
Anyway. I agree with Lindsay: I’d love to see where these kids end up in a few years with some reunion specials. (I’m pessimistically assuming that is as close as we’ll get to a Jared Nation spin-off.)
I’m blogging daily for those crazy kids at CollegeOTR. Fair warning: tomorrow I’m writing about Brooke Hogan. Sorry, guys, but I want the page views!!
I’m officially twitting, so get on it if you swing that way.
I’m hoping this will be easier to stick with than, uh, this has been, given the limited word count.
We’ll see!
image courtesy of the one and only Dave Warwak.
As a journalist, I’m not ashamed to admit that crazy vegans make for really fun news stories. But as a vegan, I sometimes have trouble reading past the headlines.
For the last few weeks I’ve watched the drama around school teacher and loudly proclaimed vegan Dave Warwak play out in Google News. In a soy nutshell (if you, too, winced at those headlines): Warwak, 44, went on a personal mission to convert the students in his art classes at Wisconsin’s Fox River Grove Middle School to veganism. As soon as the news hit the papes, Warwak was fired.
I don’t doubt that Warwak meant well. He just went vegan(gelical) in January, he’s used to molding impressionable young minds, and he probably thought he was doing the right thing. Tactless proselytizing looks much better from the inside–just like for religious teachers who’ve similarly been fired for leading prayers in class.
It’s not totally the media’s fault for characterizing people such as Warwak and the countless irresponsible “vegan” parents as vegan first and crazy second: that’s how they portray themselves. And when the vegan community stays quiet in implicit support it only makes it easier for the next crazy vegan to run with their unfounded moral righteousness. Even worse when they’re loud, misinformed and on the offensive defensive.
Vegans across the country have taken up Warwak’s “cause”–the same Warwak who just crashed the middle school homecoming parade, and handed out cards that said Santa Claus “is a lie,” and, “‘Naming a rock, a banana, does not make it food.’” Clearly he teaches art, not English.
Yet Warwak champions are popping up everywhere, from PETA (“Sound the alarm!”), to Meetup.org groups in Chicago, to Manhattan activist-bloggers.
Take Elaine Vigneault, for example.
“It’s yet another example of how vegans are painted as ‘crazy’ and our ideas are not taken seriously,” she writes. Unfortunately for Elaine, a lot of us are crazy: bat-shit, balls-to-the-wall, all-out freaking crazy. And the less that reasonable vegans differentiate themselves from the crazies, the more the entire world will go on believing that we are humorless ascetics.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, however, the humorless ascetics appear to be winning. Elaine says vegans “should be rude and obnoxious,” because we are the enlightened, and should spread our wisdom among the evil-doing masses. Well, that’s basically what she says. “Needlessly killing millions of animals is far beyond rude and obnoxious… And people who do it, people who promote it, and people who buy it deserve a little dose of the uncomfortable, rude reality.”
I guess that’s why not a lot of religious extremists hold teaching positions in public American schools, right? Because the uncomfortable, rude reality is just too tempting? Elaine claims Mr. Warwak didn’t have “some vegan cult he was recruiting for,” but when this kind of obnoxious attitude prevails, and the preaching continues, and converting the damned and absolving them of their sins is priority #1, that’s not truly the case. It just gives people more reason to block out, marginalize, alienate and fire the crazy.
You have to give people a reason to take your ideas seriously, especially if you’re challenging their entire paradigm. I don’t know one vegan who chose “the lifestyle” because they saw a disgusting PETA video or were yelled at for wearing leather. Making friends and influencing people is not about breaking them down. This isn’t a debate about animal rights or veganism: it’s about being a responsible, non-crazy adult.
And it’s also about not taking yourself so seriously. Because really, I for one think Warwak, PETA, Vigneault and the rest of the gang are hilarious.