Katie’s Ash Wednesday Blog Post

4 Replies
Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. For a lot of people, it’s a mark on a calendar, but it does mean something to me. So today, I’m going to break a taboo and write about it.

I’m twenty-five years old and I identify as Catholic. But it’s not exactly something I tell people the first time they meet me. Or the second, or the third. In fact, it’s probably not something I’d bring up until pretty late in the game, if at all. And if I do, I feel the need to qualify it: “But I’m a liberal, open-minded Catholic!”

I’m sure it’s different in other parts of the country, but in blue states, admitting to being religious, especially if you’re Christian, is almost un-PC. It’s fine to say that you were “raised” in a religion, or that your family subscribes to a religion, or to joke about Catholic guilt. It’s even fine to say that you’re spiritual but not religious, because you don’t believe in organized religion. But if I mention that I go to church as part of a conversation, I can see people’s glances uncomfortably shifting as their perception of me changes.

To give you a little background, my family is Catholic, but even though I grew up going to church and CCD and received the sacraments, we’re not super religious. As an adult, though, I realized that I did like going to church and wanted to continue going. In college, I sang at Mass with the campus Liturgical Arts Group. Now I attend The Paulist Center, a progressive Catholic church on Beacon Hill. I do not agree with everything about the Catholic Church, but I’ve found ways that I’m comfortable reconciling my personal beliefs while remaining part of the Church. I’m also very interested in learning about other religions and have tried to read more books on religion and attend services in places other than Catholic churches. It is entirely possible that my beliefs will change as I get older, and I would never tell anyone that what they believe or don’t believe is wrong.

What is wrong, though, is forcing religion on others. Trying to convert unwilling people is wrong. School-sponsored prayer before public high school football games is wrong. Trying to ban the teaching of evolution in schools is wrong. Actually, trying to ban anything in the name of religion is wrong. Opposing gay marriage is wrong, especially if you try to justify it in the name of religion. Telling people they’re going to hell is wrong.

Equally wrong, though, is disrespecting religion. It’s one thing to call people out on it if they’re forcing religion on others, but mocking someone’s personal faith or obnoxiously questioning their beliefs is a terrible thing to do. I find Bill Maher’s movie Religulous horribly offensive because he’s not mocking the forcing of religion on others or even the distortion of religion to fit one’s personal beliefs—he’s mocking people for having faith at all, and forcing people—regular people who aren’t hurting anyone—to question their beliefs.

It’s also wrong to lump all religious people into the same group, whether it’s equating all Muslims with terrorism or believing that all Christians are Sarah Palin-loving homophobes who picket abortion clinics. Particularly, the culture wars seem to have lent people license to equate “Christian” with “Republican.” As a Democrat, whose more religious family members are also Democrats, who knows far more Catholic Democrats than Catholic Republicans (although, granted, that might just be because I’m from Massachusetts and went to a Jesuit college), that bothers me a lot.

Moreover, I don’t think you’ll find any two people within a religion who believe exactly the same things. Faith is a deeply personal thing, and people interpret religion differently. Catholics like me, who don’t agree with everything about the church, are often pejoratively called “Cafeteria Catholics,” but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. People like Bill Maher accuse religious people of believing blindly, and while that’s certainly true of some people, I think they’re outnumbered by people who have given their faith serious thought and have accepted or rejected certain beliefs based on that.

The First Amendment guarantees us freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but I often wish people felt more free to speak openly about what they believe or don’t believe without insulting anyone else. I like learning about other religions, and I wish it were easier to talk to people about what they believe and why. I know this post basically boils down to “Why can’t we all just get along?” but to me, it really is frustrating that people who abuse religion have made it so hard for the rest of us to talk about it honestly. I mean, I know someone who visibly recoils if you even say the word “church,” and whom I could see tensing up when I mentioned the name of a Catholic college in casual conversation. And I know someone else who, when someone asked him out of curiosity about his religious beliefs or lack thereof, looked at the person asking the question as if he was pissed that the question had even crossed her mind. So…why can’t we all just get along?

To end this post on a lighter note, I give you this song by Christine Kane, a singer-songwriter and fellow BC grad. It’s called “Mary Catherine’s Ash Wednesday Journal Entry,” and it’s pretty funny. And check out some of Christine Kane’s other songs while you’re at it.
http://christinekane.com/blog/just-because-its-lent/

A Year In Books

8 Replies

Okay, I know we’re over twenty days into 2010 and it’s a little late to be doing year-summation things, but I do want to get this entry out. Despite the facts that I never leave the house without a book and skip over Match.com profiles of guys who say they don’t read, it’s been awhile since I’ve done a blog post about books. So, although I left out many of the books I read last year so that this post wouldn’t go on forever, here’s a sampling:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This was either the first or the second book I read this year, and definitely not the best. I think it’s the Arrested Development of recent novels—everyone seems to like it but me. I just thought it was dull and plodding and repetitive. I kept reading sentences and thinking, “Wait, didn’t I already read this?” Boring plot, boring characters…overall boring book.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

After I finished this book, I started seriously questioning my taste. I read it right after The Road, which made it the second Pulitzer Prize winner in a row that I didn’t like. My main problem with it was the main character, whom I couldn’t stand. It’s not always necessary for the reader to like the main character, but it is necessary for the main character to be interesting. Oscar was neither likeable nor interesting. He’s an overweight, whiney nerd who wants to get laid. That’s it, really. Why was I supposed to care about him? I had no idea. I did learn a lot about the history of the Dominican Republic from this book, but it almost felt like the historical stuff was there to pad a rather dull story about an unlikeable character.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I don’t think I’ve ever done such a complete 180 on a book. For about the first sixty pages, I was having trouble getting into it, and I almost stopped reading. But then I got interested, and by the end I knew I’d have to read it again (which I did, later in the year). I think the format just takes some getting used to—if you’re not familiar with the plot, it’s about the romance of Henry, who has a condition that causes him to involuntarily travel through time, sometimes seeing himself in the past or future, and Clare, who does not. Despite the weird premise, it doesn’t feel like fantasy or science fiction—it’s really just a love story. The main characters are likeable and interesting, and the romance is convincing enough that you can manage to suspend your disbelief enough to accept the time-traveling plot.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

I liked this book a lot, way more than I expected to. I liked Sittenfeld’s two previous novels, Prep and The Man of My Dreams, but I think this is better than both of them- stronger plot, more interesting characters. This is “the Laura Bush book,” a novel where the main character is clearly modeled after the former first lady. So it feels kind of weird to be recommending it so strongly, but back in 2004, Curtis Sittenfeld wrote an article for Salon about how even though she’s a Democrat, she loves Laura Bush, and her argument was convincing enough that I could see how Laura would be an interesting subject for a book. But this is a novel, so it’s about “Alice Blackwell,” who comes across as an interesting person with a complicated inner life. While it skips sections of her life, including large parts of her husband’s political career, it’s divided into the important parts: her teenage years and a tragedy that shaped her, the beginning of her romance with her husband, the early years of her marriage, and her life in the White House. There are some fantastic characters in the book, especially Alice’s liberal, outspoken, closeted lesbian grandmother. The author also nails the characterization of the W character, Charlie Blackwell, and his family. She makes you believe that someone could actually fall in love with and marry Dubya. There’s one quote that sums the book up quite nicely: “All I did was marry him. You’re the ones who gave him power.” And that’s why, even if you don’t think so at first, a book about Laura Bush can be interesting

The Sweet Life of Stella Madison by Lara Zeises

I first heard of young adult author Lara Zeises when poking around the website for Emerson College’s MFA program and seeing her listed as one of the graduates. Later, I found out that about ten years ago, she was my boss’s assistant at another publishing company. Before this book published, I’d been in contact with her both for work-related reasons and to tell her how much I liked her previous YA novels (Bringing Up the Bones, Contents Under Pressure, and Anyone But You, along with the two True Confessions of a Hollywood Starlet books, which she writes under the name Lola Douglas). Then one day at work, I got a special delivery—an advance copy of her new book, The Sweet Life of Stella Madison! It’s a very enjoyable book about the teenage daughter of two famous chefs who, despite knowing nothing about food herself, is asked to write a food column for the local newspaper. Meanwhile, she’s torn between two guys and attempting to come to terms with her parents’ separation. It’s a fun read with a great main character, and I definitely recommend all of Lara’s other books, too.

I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is a publicist in her early thirties, and this is her first book of humorous essays. They were kind of hit-or-miss. Some of them are really funny- two favorites are the ones about a Miranda Priestly-like first boss and another about being a bridesmaid for an old friend she’d fallen out of touch with- but some of them are really boring. There are some essays that could be summed up in one sentence- “I didn’t find out until I was sixteen that my father is my mother’s second husband.” “I’m a vegetarian who eats sushi.”

Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan

Milton, MA native and Smith graduate Courtney Sullivan’s first novel was published last summer, when she was twenty-seven. It follow four friends who meet at Smith and alternates between their college years and their lives as twenty-somethings trying to make it in the real world. During college, things like date rape, an affair with a professor, and falling in love with a woman shape their experiences. After college, they contemplate first jobs, real-world dating, and marriage and children. They’ve learned all about feminist principles and female empowerment in school, but figuring out how those concepts work in their own lives is trickier. This is a theme that really touched a nerve with me, because unlike the characters in the book, I never took women’s studies or thought seriously about feminism while in college. It’s only since graduating and working full-time that I’ve become really interested in the subject, but that’s a topic for another blog post. In any case, the characters seem very real and are in the same stage of life I’m in, which made this book easy to get into—I read the whole thing very quickly. One thing that did bother me, though, was a subplot where one main character gets in over her head working with a radical filmmaker on a documentary about human trafficking. While I appreciate what the author is trying to do in bringing attention to a horrifying topic that most people don’t know a lot about, in the end, the point she ends up making is more about how crazy the filmmaker is than anything else. But overall, this was a great book that I highly recommend.

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels

Speaking of feminism, the title of this book jumped out at me one day in Borders. I am woefully under-read on feminist topics, but of all issues, I think I’m most interested in why mothers, even if they’re married, have a much harder time balancing work and family than men do. This book delves into some of those reasons and takes a critical look at the ways in which the media and pop culture make mothers feel like they’re doing everything wrong—everything from magazine cover stories about celebrity moms to sensationalized media stories about “bad mothers” to idealized portrayals of parenting in Lifetime movies and TV shows like Thirtysomething. It also looks at how legislators have squandered chances to help working mothers, decrying as “Communist” required maternity leave and state-sponsored daycare, things that women in many developed countries take for granted. The book is written by one communication studies professor and one philosophy professor, and it’s very well-researched, but it’s also very accessibly written in a snappy, sarcastic tone, and I really enjoyed reading it. It was published in 2004, so I’d like to hear what the authors have to say on recent pop culture topics like Kate Gosselin, the Octomom, and what shows like Desperate Housewives and Mad Men say about motherhood.

We Thought You Would Be Prettier: True Tales of the Dorkiest Girl Alive by Laurie Notaro

This is another book of humorous essays. I think I’d put Laurie Notaro somewhere below Susan Jane Gilman and above Sloane Crosley in the running for the “female David Sedaris” title. Two essays I remember are one about why she got banned from the Y and another about how she tends to speak her mind at inappropriate times. I think this was her fourth book, so I have to check out the other ones.

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

Hands-down the saddest novel I read last year. This is a young adult novel that begins after a teenage girl named Hannah commits suicide. The narrator, Clay, had a crush on Hannah and is devastated by her death. Then one day, he gets a package in the mail containing several audio tapes. Before her death, Hannah recorded herself explaining her state of mind before her suicide. Each side of each tape explains what one person did that played a part in her decision to end her life, and the tapes have been passed down from one person mentioned on the tapes to another, in the order that they’re mentioned. A lot of actions had unintended consequences, and Hannah herself is not innocent in that regard. It did bother me how Hannah seemed to blame her problems on so many other people and had so little regard for her parents, who weren’t the source of her problems. But this was an engrossing, thought-provoking read overall, and I like that the book acknowledges that suicidal depression isn’t always caused by one big thing, but sometimes by smaller things that add up and spiral out of control.

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi

Spurred on by The Mommy Myth, I bought another book on feminism. This one was first published in 1991, but in 2006 an update edition with a new preface came out. It explores how in the 1980s, the news and pop culture kept misleading the public into believing that career-minded women or women whose first desires were not for a husband and children were crazy, sad, lonely, doomed, etc., and that feminism itself was to blame for these problems. It was a really interesting read and I didn’t want it to end.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

For over ten years, LeBlanc followed a family in the Bronx and the layers upon layers of trouble that followed them over the years. Their experiences read like a laundry list of social issues—teenage pregnancy, violence, drugs, prison time, poverty, homelessness, sexual abuse, all of which occur in the family more than once. In particular, the narrative focuses on Jessica, the girlfriend of a big-time heroin dealer, and Coco, the girlfriend of Jessica’s younger brother and the mother of two of his children. It can get a little complicated keeping track of all the people involved in the story, but that’s how life is. It’s a very ambitious work of journalism, but I think LeBlanc succeeds completely. It’s amazing how much access she was able to get to these people’s lives and how much they opened up to her.

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman

I adored Susan Jane Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, so I was excited to read this book. While that book was composed of humorous essays, this one is just a narrative. After graduating from Brown in 1986, Gilman and her friend (whom she pseudonymously calls Claire Van Houten) decided to travel around the world, starting in Communist China. Not speaking the language and not quite comprehending the implications of travelling in a Communist country, they find themselves in over their heads. But most frighteningly, Claire starts acting paranoid and delusional, and it takes Gilman awhile to realize that her friend is mentally ill. While the subject matter is serious and at times very suspenseful, there are plenty of touches of humor throughout with Gilman’s distinctive style. She’s a great writer, and I can’t wait to read her other book.

An Entire Post About Waffles

2 Replies

Last year, I bought a waffle iron. In college, the dining halls had Belgian waffle makers you could use to make waffles for yourself, and I would wake up weekend mornings dying for waffles slathered in whipped cream. (Just whipped cream- no syrup, no butter, no fruit.) I still order waffles a lot when I go out for brunch, so I figured I should probably get something so I could make them myself when the craving struck me.

Just one problem. I couldn’t get it to work.

A waffle iron should not be that hard to use. You pour the batter in, close it, rotate it, and wait for the light to come on. I did it all the time in college. It was simple.

Except this time it wasn’t. On three separate occasions, I followed the instructions exactly and still ended up with either burnt batter that smelled awful or gooey, undercooked strips of something in an indefinable shape. And all three occasions involved multiple rounds of failed attempts at waffles followed by a lot of scrubbing. It was quite tragic. To steal a line from my sister, a fellow fan of BC waffles, “There is nothing worse than really wanting waffles and not getting them.”

This morning, I tried it again. Rounds 1 and 2 produced a substance that was edible but not in any way shaped like a waffle. But Round 3?

Or something like that. It was the result of getting it set to the right temperature, NOT waiting for the “ready” light to come on, and immediately unplugging the iron as soon as the waffles were done. They were still slightly burned and certainly weren’t the best waffles I’d ever tasted, but they were definitely edible and made for a great breakfast.

I think this is a good omen for the new year, don’t you?

2009 Recap

4 Replies

Almost the end of the year- and the decade. (Did we ever settle on a name for the decade that’s about to end?) My mom and my sister and I have decided that the last few days of the year are like Mardi Gras—you spend them indulging in all the bad habits you want to give up in the new year. So the past few days have been spent eating junk, not exercising, staying up too late, not getting writing done, watching too many reruns of 90s sitcoms, and bringing work home with me.

2009 was an interesting year for me. Outwardly, it doesn’t look like a lot changed or anything monumental happened. I’m still single, I still have the same job, and I still have the same apartment with the same roommates. But internally, a lot changed for me. As you remember, I started the year feeling a bit overwhelmed. Not long after that, I started experiencing symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder—something I’d experienced in the past but hadn’t expected to return. That pretty much dominated the early months of 2009. Eventually I realized that I needed help and started seeing a therapist, which has helped a lot. I’ve had some personal epiphanies and gotten better at being able to talk myself out of irrational worry.

I am still single, but I’ve made way more progress on that front than in any previous year. I don’t know if it’s my increased confidence or if I’m just meeting better guys, but most of the dates I went on this past year were not horrible. Even if they were dates with guys with whom I didn’t want to pursue relationships, they gave me hope that a relationship could be in my future.

I have the same job, which I still love. I did, in 2009, apply unsuccessfully for two jobs within my company that I didn’t get. The second time, I came very close to getting a job that a lot of people applied for, which was encouraging (although the long interview process left me kind of drained). But my mindset, when it comes to work, has improved a lot in the last year.

I had a lot of fun this year, too. Continued to sing in the Somerville Community Chorus, took a terrific Grub Street class that encouraged me to continue what I’m writing, had some drinks with friends, had some drinks with colleagues, sang some karaoke, went to some fun parties, joined my company softball team, which was a lot of fun even though I sucked and we lost most of our games. Saw some good movies, listened to some good music, watched some good TV, and read a lot of good books, which will probably warrant their own post.

I feel more secure in my friendships than I have in a long time. I’ve had a lot of neurotic doubts about my relationships with friends, which I’ve documented here, but I feel like with every day that goes by, I’m more convinced that people are more alike than different, and that most people are worth getting to know, and that those who are kind outnumber those who are unkind. Not to be cheesy and quote a ten-year-old movie or anything, but “it’s hard to be angry when there’s so much beauty in the world.”

And not to become one of those people who prefaces everything with “my therapist says,” but my therapist recommended making a list of ten goals for the new year—just ten, which for a compulsive list-maker like me isn’t many. I’m not going to say what they are, but check back here in a year and I’ll let you know if I’ve achieved them.

I’m hopeful about the new year and the new decade. I think it’s going to be a great one.

Christmas On the Internet

2 Replies

I love everything about the Christmas season. I love going to the mall and buying presents, seeing everything decorated, Christmas music (my Christmas playlist has over 160 songs on it), the TV specials and movies, making Christmas cookies, everything. I can’t wait until we get a good amount of snow so that it looks more like Christmas.

I realize I sound like an over-earnest loser, but I don’t care. This is one thing about myself I hope never changes. I know there are plenty of reasons to stress out over the holidays and that those reasons increase as you get older and have children, but I hope I’m always able to look past them. It’s only a small portion of the year, and we need to enjoy it while it lasts.

Okay, I’m done with that. Moving on- in previous years, I’ve blogged about Christmas on the radio and Christmas on TV. What’s left? Why, of course- the Internet!

Here’s “The Christmas Tree.” This guy does a lot of videos with a wig, dark glasses, and a thick New York accent. I think he’s imitating his mother. My sister showed me this last Christmas, and at first I didn’t think it was that funny, but the more I watched it, the more I liked it.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTs5eKZ0i1E&w=420&h=315]

The title of this one makes it sound sketchy, but it’s not- just hilarious. David Sedaris’s “Six to Eight Black Men” tells about some strange Christmas traditions in the Netherlands (and how it’s legal for the blind to hunt in Michigan). Scroll down a bit to hear Sedaris’s own reading of Six to Eight Black Men.

And finally, a word from my girls Garfunkel and Oates, on the phenomenon known as “Present Face,” which has befallen all of us when we get an unwanted gift.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFgbbUt1jY&w=420&h=315]

Let Us Now Praise Betty Draper

6 Replies

WARNING: Herein lie massive spoilers for pretty much every episode of Mad Men that has ever aired.

An awesome season of Mad Men has just ended, and I’m sad that I have to wait until next summer to see more of Don Draper & company. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce? While the whole season was leading up to at least some characters leaving, that was completely not how I thought it would happen.

However, there’s one thing I keep hearing from all over the place that’s been bugging me, and I want to address it here. People on the Internet, people I know in real life, and professional columnists have all been bashing Betty Draper. Sometimes their dislike of the character extends to January Jones, the actress who plays her.

I think Betty deserves a post in her favor, and that’s what I’m going to offer here.

I could point out the worse things that other characters on the show have done, but I think that would be pointless. If you watch the show, you know that no one is completely likable. Virtually every main character has had an affair or said or done something offensive at some point.

But Betty seems to get on people’s nerves like none other. I actually think one of the main functions of her character is to make the viewer uncomfortable, and the writers accomplish this by making her more than a stereotypical 1960s housewife. The stifled-in-the-suburbs thing has been done to death, both in mid-20th-century settings (see: Revolutionary Road, the “Mrs. Brown” parts of The Hours) and modern times (Little Children, American Beauty, even Desperate Housewives, to some extent). The idea that a 1960s woman could feel unfulfilled as a mother and housewife is hardly new. So the writers didn’t make her someone obsessed with making the perfect dinner, feeling pressure to always have a spotless house, wishing for an occupation in which she’d get to use her brains, etc.

Instead, Betty’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not that she sits around pining for a life other than that of a suburban housewife—it’s that she’s unhappy but doesn’t quite know what to wish for.

Betty did go to college and had a career before she met Don. The significance is in what her career was—a model. This past season, Betty’s father mentioned that she was a fat child, but I’d forgotten that Betty herself mentioned that in the first season while recounting how she didn’t realize how much weight she’d lost until her high school home ec teacher pointed out that the pajamas she was making were too big. Betty’s mother, who died shortly before the start of the show, was apparently very concerned with appearances, and I think Betty’s career as a model was a reaction to that—validation that she was beautiful to other people. Betty talks to her shrink in the first season about her mother , saying, “She wanted me to be beautiful so I could find a man- there’s nothing wrong with that.” She’d been taught that beauty was all she needed to get by, and when she landed a gorgeous, successful, smooth-talking husband, she likely thought that was her happy ending. But that, of course, wouldn’t have led to the backlash against her that inspired this post.

It amazes me that some people think Betty is a dumb bimbo. Is it just because she’s blonde and pretty? She can be childish and naïve, but we’ve seen plenty of evidence of her intelligence. She reads books like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, she majored in anthropology at Bryn Mawr, and she speaks fluent Italian. She said herself in one episode, “We all have skills we don’t use.” The thing is, though, I don’t think Betty consciously wishes for a life that’s more intellectually fulfilling, and that’s because she can’t fathom a life without a man. We saw something similar with Joan in the first season—Joan was genuinely surprised when she realized that Peggy wanted to become a copywriter for her career’s sake rather than to spend more time with Paul. It had just never occurred to Joan that she could find fulfillment in a career rather than marriage, and I don’t think it’s occurred to Betty yet, either. Subconsciously, I think she might want more out of life than being a housewife—after all, the happiest we’ve seen her all season was when she and the Junior League were successful at stopping the water tank, small as that accomplishment was. But that’s not really the point.

Shortly after her victory with the Junior League, she and Don travel to Rome, where she impresses everyone with both her looks and her charming command of Italian. Upon their return home, though, it’s back to her regular, boring routine. Don tells her flat-out, although he means it as a compliment, that he wants to “show her off” at an awards ceremony. This is just before Don reveals the truth about his identity, which in some ways adds insult to injury. Don has come from nothing to achieve this life that he’s carefully constructed for himself—successful Madison Avenue career, house in the suburbs, gorgeous wife, cute kids—and she’s merely a prop in it.

The problem is that she’s not quite sure how to be anything else. In the first season, while divorcee Helen Bishop intrigued her, Betty didn’t envy her. In fact, she and her friends seemed disdainful of everything about Helen. While she kicked Don out in Season 2, I don’t think she would have divorced him even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant because I don’t think she knows how she’d function as an unmarried woman. It’s not until she meets Henry Francis, someone who she feels could rescue her—symbolized by the fainting couch he convinces her to put in her living room—that she seriously considers leaving Don. Henry is actually a pretty boring character, especially compared to Don, and I don’t think Betty is in love with him as much as the idea of him as her knight in shining armor.

The interesting thing is that I think that people’s disdain toward Betty increased as the show went on. In the first season, she was childish and anxious and sad, and I think people were more sympathetic toward her then. She had a lot of emotions that she didn’t know how to express, which manifested themselves through her lack of control over her hands or her sobbing to a child that she had no one to talk to. She couldn’t even trust her psychiatrist, who was sharing everything she said with Don. Who wouldn’t sympathize with her?

But between the first and second season, a little over a year passed, and in Season 2, Betty gradually starts asserting herself more. Through most of the first season, she was in denial about Don’s affairs, and when she finally acknowledged them, she was more sad than angry, but in the second season she confronts Don directly when she gets wind of his affair with Bobbie. We also see a lot more open resentment towards Don and her children in general, and she becomes more and more unpleasant.

This is the wrong time to be writing this, seeing as how she just bombed as a host on Saturday Night Live, but personally, I think January Jones does a great job portraying Betty. That she’s made people dislike her character is, I think, almost an indication that she’s doing her job successfully. Sexism is big theme on Mad Men, and most of the time it’s much more overt—we get Pete telling Peggy to wear shorter skirts on her first day and Joan, lacking a term like “spousal rape” to label her experience, quietly going on with her life after her fiancé sexually assaults her. The sexism in Betty’s situation is subtler. We’re not hit with “OMG life as a suburban housewife is so oppressive!” because Betty hasn’t quite formulated that thought herself, so it’s easy to dismiss Betty’s unpleasantness as a character trait instead of a manifestation of the sexist world she lives in.

The great thing about this show is that you keep thinking about the episodes for a long time after they air. I actually wasn’t crazy about the Rome episode when I first watched it, but when it was over, I began to realize its significance. The episode gave us a glimpse of the intelligent, sophisticated woman Betty could be in another life. Ironically, most of the women Don has cheated on her with have, in fact, been intelligent, sophisticated women. If that’s what Don really wants, he could have had it if he hadn’t forced Betty into suburban conformity.

Off to watch the special features on the Season 1 DVDs now. Is it summer yet?

Random Question

4 Replies

There’s a great new frozen yogurt shop in my neighborhood called Spun.

Which got me thinking about something- does anyone else call frozen yogurt “frogurt”? That’s what my mom calls it, and it’s an expression I picked up. But whenever I say it, people look at me like there’s something growing out of my forehead. Once, in college, at the Paris Creperie, I ordered “Nutella frogurt,” and the girl behind the counter said pointedly, “You mean frozen yogurt?” I’ve heard “froyo,” but do other people say “frogurt” or is that just some weird thing my mom made up?

With Friends Like These…

7 Replies

Recently, the Internet has been abuzz with outrage about a terrible piece of advice. If you haven’t heard about it, be prepared for a massive spike in blood pressure. A woman wrote to Lucinda Rosenfeld at Double X, telling an awful story about how her drink was drugged at a concert and the two friends she came with not only went home without her when they couldn’t find her but, after she was taken to the hospital with no memory of what had happened, only grudgingly drove her back to her car when she called them. Rosenfeld’s “advice” was that while a significant other or a family member is obligated to help out in that situation, a friend is not. Infuriatingly, she also insinuated that the letter writer might have a drinking problem and was possibly lying about being drugged. You can read about the whole situation here, and there’s also a good discussion of it on Tomato Nation (Sarah Bunting, the founder of that site and co-founder of Television Without Pity, is a much, much better advice columnist, by the way).

As discouraging as it is to read about this, it is, at least, a bit heartening that the vast majority of people who read Rosenfeld’s column are furious. So I’m not going to repeat the points others have made.

But the column did get me thinking. Rosenfeld apparently doesn’t think that friends are obligated to respond to a panicked 4 AM phone call, although not many agree with her. If someone called me at 4AM in a terrible situation like the letter writer’s, even if it wasn’t a close friend, I’d respond and help. And if I called someone in the same situation, I’m sure someone would help me, because that’s what decent people do.

This is my question: which friend would I call? My issue with the situation isn’t that no one would respond. It’s that whomever I called would respond, but I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t be surprised to be the first person I called. I can’t imagine calling anyone in that situation who wouldn’t be thinking, “She didn’t have anyone else to call? Really?”

The thing is, that letter raised a lot of interesting points about date-rape drugs, blaming the victim, the obligations of friends, and the assumptions that prevent women from reporting rapes. But a smaller point it raised was that sometimes the people we think are our close friends don’t actually see us that way.

And that is a huge fear of mine. I have made that mistake before. My freshman year of college, I had the unfortunate experience of realizing that some girls I’d considered close friends didn’t actually like me, or at least didn’t consider me a close friend. I know that was a long time ago and I should be over it, but the fact is, it still influences the way I behave towards those I meet and sometimes keeps me from getting too close to people. When I start to make new friends, I can’t help but think things like, Do these people really want me here? Do they actually like me or are they just being polite? Oh, no—should I have said that? Did I accidentally offend someone? Am I being annoying without realizing it? Maybe I shouldn’t have come. And if people don’t invite me to do something, is it because they forgot about me or because they genuinely don’t want me there?

I don’t think I’d be the first person anyone would call at 4 AM, either. Again, is that because I haven’t let anyone get too close to me, or because other people see me as selfish or unreliable? It’s occurred to me recently that there are people I consider friends whose phone numbers I don’t even have. What do those people really think about me?

This post probably makes me sound like a neurotic freak, but it’s not a new thing. I think about it a lot, because I always wonder what would happen if I left Boston. Would people forget about me? How many people would really miss me? What would happen if I left and then came back? How many people would really want to stay in touch with me?

Everyone likes to think that friendship lasts forever, but that’s not usually true, in my experience. Even if you don’t stop being friends with someone, eventually someone will move away or get married or move onto a new stage of life, and inevitably, the friendship will change. Someone you still consider one of your best friends might no longer be the first person you call when something good or something bad happens. You like to think that your friends care enough about your life to want to hear what’s going on with you, but ultimately, you care too much about their lives to be willing to subject them to it.

Wow, this post sounds really depressing. But I can’t complain too much—at least I haven’t been drugged and left alone to fend for myself in a hospital with no memory of most of the night. As that poor woman starts to recover from that horrifying experience, I wonder whom she’s leaning on, since her family is far away and she clearly can’t depend on her friends. I hope she’s successful in finding better friends. In the meantime, at least I know I have people who wouldn’t leave me alone in a bar and would willingly come pick me up if I called them from the hospital in the middle of the night—regardless of what those people really think of me.

The Cheno Fills Me with Glee

Leave a reply

I’m watching and loving Glee, and I have to say, if this show isn’t a runaway hit (which seems unlikely), it will not be the network’s fault. Fox has promoted the hell out of it. I’m not going to do a whole post on it, though, because I don’t really have anything new or insightful to say about it- it’s just a great show that you should watch if you’re not already.

Unfortunately, I’m also taking a writing class on Wednesday nights through Grub Street, so I’m not able to see Glee as it airs. I’m looking forward to tonight’s DVR-ed episode, though, especially because the fantastic Kristin Chenoweth guest stars tonight.

If you’ve never heard The Cheno’s song “Taylor the Latte Boy,” here it is:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXS0nEOx_20]

Most adorable song ever. When we did a CD swap at work, I put this on one of my mixes. I have a feeling everyone in my group was thinking, “What the hell is this? I want my pensive indie-rock!”

But this song never fails to put a smile on my face. Glee and Kristin Chenoweth seem like a match made in heaven.

Thoughts on Two Movies

4 Replies

This isn’t a Katie Recommends or even a review, really—just thoughts on two movies I’ve seen recently: 500 Days of Summer and Julie and Julia. These thoughts don’t really have anything to do with each other…they’re just two movies I wanted to write about because they made me think about things beyond what I saw on the screen. So here we go. WARNING: This entry contains spoilers for both movies, plus The Way We Were.

500 Days of Summer
I didn’t want to see this movie at first, largely because of the moment they show on all the previews, where the guy decides he likes the girl after they discover they both like The Smiths. That just bugs me because I think music is a really shallow thing to base a relationship on—it’s like dating someone because you both like chocolate pudding—and yet, people do it. But it turns out that the moment where they bond over The Smiths isn’t really about the music—it’s more like the guy (Tom) realizing that, based on a short conversation, the girl (Summer) is someone he might be able to date instead of just admire from afar.

But, as we discover, he probably would have been better off doing just that. The book and movie He’s Just Not That Into You detail how women tend to ignore signs that guys aren’t interested, or at least aren’t as interested as the women want them to be. This movie proves that men can have that same tendency—it could easily have been called She’s Just Not That Into You. Summer tells Tom upfront that she doesn’t want a boyfriend and doesn’t believe in love, but Tom keeps pursuing her, and soon they’re quasi-dating. On day 290, Summer tells Tom she doesn’t want to see him anymore, and he plunges into a massive depression, vowing that he’s going to “get her back.” But instead, just as he thinks things might be ready to start up again with them, he learns that Summer is engaged to another man (whom we never meet and learn next to nothing about). He’s Just Not That Into You tells us that if he says he doesn’t want a girlfriend, he really just doesn’t want you to be his girlfriend. If he says he doesn’t want to get married, he really just doesn’t want to marry you. If he’s breaking up with you, he doesn’t want to be with you and you should leave it at that. If you replace the pronouns, that’s the lesson of this movie.

I don’t want to make it sound like this is a bad movie, because it’s really not. It’s entertaining and funny with some great lines, and the narrative is non-linear, which is an interesting, if a bit gimmicky, format. But I had two big problems with it. The first is that it’s a movie about a failed relationship. I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me on this, but I think that movies about relationships that don’t work out are usually pointless and rarely interesting. Breakups, to me, are like babies—if you have a baby, other people will be interested to a certain extent but don’t want to hear you go on and on about it, and the same is true for breakups. They’re just not that interesting to anyone except the people going through them. You wouldn’t make a whole movie about how cute a baby is, and you shouldn’t make a whole movie about how awful a breakup is.

In the Sex and the City quote at the top of my blog, “Katie” is Katie Morosky, Barbra Streisand’s character in The Way We Were, another movie about a relationship that didn’t work out. When I saw that movie, I’d recently seen The Breakup with Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn ( a movie that’s not only pointless but pretty depressing—if you haven’t seen it, don’t), and so The Way We Were kind of felt like The Breakup with Communism. It was a movie about two people who just weren’t right for each other, and so is 500 Days of Summer. Personally, I don’t find anything interesting about two people who aren’t right for each other. Most combinations of two people aren’t. It’s the relationships that defy the odds and work out, and the hard work as well as the romance that goes into them, that are really interesting to me.

The other problem that I had with is related to the She’s Just Not That Into You thing—that Tom keeps pursuing Summer despite the clear signs that she’s not interested. Granted, Summer does lead him on quite a bit, which is never cool, and Tom is guilty of misreading signals above all else. But since Summer did tell him outright that she didn’t want a boyfriend, then that she didn’t want to be with him, I found his line of thinking disturbing. It’s the same reasoning that date rapists use—she said no, but she meant yes. And I realize that it’s a big leap to go from misguided, hopeless romantic young man to date rapist, but the thinking is similar. Tom thinks he can “get Summer back,” as if it’s just a matter of him doing the right combination of things and not a decision of hers as well. He isn’t willing to let her make her choice and be done with it—he has to have things his way. Many women are guilty of thinking this way, too, that if they just say or do the right thing, the guy will change his mind, but somehow, it does seem a bit more disturbing from a guy, as if he thinks that dating her is his right.

In the case of this particular movie, it’s also more disturbing because of the card at the beginning: “Any resemblance to people living or dead is purely accidental … Especially Jenny Beckman … Bitch.” I laughed when I read it, thinking it was some kind of inside joke, but then I read this article. There’s no way of proving if “Jenny Beckman” is real or just a fabrication meant to draw more attention to the film, but if she is real, that brings another level to this movie, one that kind of scares me.

Julie and Julia

My thoughts on this movie are much more positive, and aside from the spoilers, I need to make another disclaimer: when I refer to Julie and Julia in this post, I’m referring to them as characters portrayed on screen, not the real Julia Child and Julie Powell. I know from reading that there is a lot about their lives that the movie left out—for instance, that Julia Child was a spy and some not-so-pleasant things I learned about Julie Powell as a person—but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

If you don’t know the plot, in a nutshell, it follows Julia Child (Meryl Streep) as she learns French cooking while living in Paris with her diplomat husband and eventually seeks publication for Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Meanwhile, it also follows Julie Powell (Amy Adams), who in 2002 started a blog in which she spent a year cooking all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

The movie was directed by Nora Ephron, who has written and/or directed several of my favorite movies, and the tone of the movie is familiar to anyone who’s watched one of her movies. Amy Adams is adorable and reminds me of a young Meg Ryan, and there’s a scene where Julie and her three friends are in a restaurant and all order Cobb salad minus one ingredient (a different ingredient for each of them) that’s reminiscent of Meg Ryan’s character in When Harry Met Sally taking too long to order in a restaurant. And as for Meryl Streep…well, your opinion of her will not change after seeing this movie. She’s as awesome as ever.

There turned out to be a lot more to this movie than I expected. First of all, it’s about two women who found success at unexpected times in unexpected places. Julia Child is in her late thirties when the events of this movie take place, and it wasn’t until then, after she’d spent a lot of time not quite knowing what to do with herself in France, that she began the work for which she’s known. Also, she didn’t meet her husband, whom she was married to until he died at age ninety-two, until her mid-thirties.

I’ve read a lot of reviews of this movies that say that the Julie parts aren’t as interesting as the Julia parts, but I strongly disagree. I actually think the Julie scenes might be a bit more interesting, partly because I found them easier to relate to. In 2002, Julie was twenty-nine, working in a dead-end job for Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (after 9/11, which had to be the worst job in the world), and living in a tiny apartment above a pizza shop in Queens. She’d written a novel that couldn’t find a publisher, and in the Cobb salad scene I mentioned, she’s out to lunch with a group of obnoxious friends who flaunt their success in her face, dramatically breaking out the Blackberries in the restaurant. One of them even makes her the focus of a pitying article in New York magazine (I don’t think that actually happened in real life, but it’s still a mortifying scene). But when she reads over the copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking she jacked from her parents’ house, she decides to take her life in a new direction by attempting to cook all 524 recipes in the book in a year and blogging about it. She not only meets her goal (not without a few challenges), but becomes the ultimate blogger success story: her blog became a book, the book became a movie. Essentially, while the Julia parts were enjoyable, the Julie parts were what really resonated with me. Julia Child is an icon, and while the movie humanizes her, it doesn’t take her off her pedestal. Julie, however, is one of us—a neurotic, angsty, struggling twenty-something (married, though) who will never be up on the pedestal herself, but reaches her own version of greatness by accomplishing what a great woman did before.

The other thing I enjoyed about this movie is how both women achieve success while their husbands wait supportively in the background. This is something that has always bugged me—it seems like in any movie about a woman accomplishing something, her significant other either leaves her or doesn’t exist. On the other hand, in any movie about a man accomplishing something, there’s always a supportive wife, and it seems like in any given year, half the Best Supporting Actress nominees are “wife-of” characters. In most movies, it seems like men can have it all but women can either have a loving partner or personal success. Not in this one.

I’ve written before about how lately I’ve found myself fearing things staying the same, a fear that’s probably shared by a lot of people my age. I’ve felt this way even more lately because this summer, I spent a good deal of time and energy applying for a job that I really wanted but ultimately didn’t get, and I’m not sure what the next step will be for me. So it’s gratifying to watch a movie about two women who found success in unexpected places at times when they weren’t sure what their next step was, either.