And the Prize for Sulkiest Player Goes to…

Posted on November 30, 2010 by lisafindley

Hi all! Welcome back from the Thanksgiving break. I hope those of you who had uncomfortable family situations and the like were able to get through and find enjoyment away from the dinner table. For those of you lucky enough to enjoy going home, I hope it was another good year of feasting and family. Mine was another delightful combination of family, friends, and food, and I took advantage of my parents’ TiVo for a whole lotta 30 Rock. Good times all ’round!

But there were a few times I squirmed a little, though they had nothing to do with the holiday. My friends and I met up Friday and Saturday nights, and both nights we played various word games — Pass the Hippo, Scattergories, Catchphrase. My high school friends and I all happen to be smart in a wordy kind of way, so these nerdy games are just our kind of fun. But in addition to the 6 or so of us gathered around the coffee table, an extra guest snuck in: competition.

I don’t like losing, but more importantly, I don’t like looking the fool. If I’m doing well, just not as well as the other team, that’s fine. I might get in some smack talk and will probably feel energized by the good feeling a well-matched competition engenders. I’ll groan about losing and probably nitpick rules a little, but generally, I enjoy myself even if I lose. It’s when I’m losing badly that I get defensive and grumpy.

This type of competitiveness has nothing to do with playing a good game, or putting skills to use, or enjoying camaraderie with friends. It has everything to do with pride, that little jerk. I don’t blame myself for feeling like this; nobody likes to have their pride hurt, even if it is among friends who won’t judge you. I do blame myself for how I react. Afterward, I always think, “geez, it wasn’t that bad, I should’ve just laughed it off” or “eh, next time have another beer and blame it on that,” but at the time, I get tense and sulky. I blame the Catchphrase gamepiece for running out of time on me every single time, or I say I have too many vowels when I’m playing Scrabble. I grumble when people call for another round and say we should switch games.

I don’t think my behavior would improve if I admitted to a competitive streak upfront, as most of my friends do, because I think it’s different from the drive to win. Part of it is, sure, but it’s more the drive to save face in all situations and avoid being laughed at at all costs. Sorry to get a bit psychoanalytical on you, but probably five miserable tween years being mocked for just about everything had more of an effect on me than I’d like to admit fifteen years later. Unfortunately, being bullied didn’t make me nicer or more easygoing; it made me harder and more defensive. That’s something I’ve been working against for years now, and I do well most of the time, but put me in the ring with better opponents than I, and those nasty, scared tendencies shoot right to the surface like hidden claws.

Anyway, that’s something for me to think about the next time someone busts out Taboo and I try to remember that it really is just a game, and a fun one at that.

How about you? Do you get involved in the game no matter how well you’re doing? Do you find yourself blaming external forces if you’re doing badly, or do you admit you’re just not doing so hot?

Smokin’!

Posted on November 23, 2010 by lisafindley

What is the most dangerous part of living in the city? Random attacks on the street? Gang violence? Daley’s privatization schemes? No, as terrifying as those all are, I am here to tell you that the closest I’ve come to death in my three years of living in Chicago was last Wednesday, when I nearly killed myself with the self-clean option on my oven.

I’d had a dinner party the previous Friday, and I guess some of that tasty meal must’ve spilled over into the oven during cooking, because when I was baking a pumpkin pie on Sunday, smoke rushed out of the oven vent and the smoke alarm went off. I opened some windows and set up a fan, and the alarm went quiet. The pie cooked for another hour, and the oven continued to smoke slightly. (The pie was unharmed, you’ll be glad to know.) Obviously this problem needed more attention, so Thursday I scrubbed the oven til it seemed pretty clean, and then I decided to use the self-clean button to finish it up. HORRIBLE MISTAKE. Almost as bad as deciding to watch The Proposal.

It started out okay. I went back to the living room and started watching The Office on Hulu and going through my mail. About ten minutes later, just when I was thinking, “Gee, this show is terribly mediocre lately,” I heard the piercing cry of my smoke alarm. I ran to the hall and saw my ENTIRE kitchen and dining room full of smoke. Like, all I could see was dirty white smoke rushing at my eyeballs with malicious intent. After clambering on a chair to grab the smoke alarm and pull out the battery (yes, thank you, I am aware of my impending doom, now please be quiet), I ran around the house opening windows and turning on fans. It was only as I was gasping for breath at the window in my bathroom that I realized, “I am inhaling huge amounts of smoke and will likely die of suffocation or lung collapse,” and wrapped a bandana around my face. I looked like this:

my aunt gave me this bandana for hiking trips, but turns out it is also useful in those perilous "quiet night at home" situations

Smokey and the Bandit

I cowered in my bathroom, door shut and window open, freezing in the late December elements and figuring out a plan. I quickly ascertained the best plan of action was to not die, so I called up my friend Claire and begged to be sheltered from this fiery storm. Note that I did not turn off the self-clean function on the oven, oh no. It was scheduled to take 4 hours and 20 minutes and come hell or high water (or fire department), it would finish what it was scheduled to do. The smoke had cleared up so I could open my eyes without a burning sensation, and there wasn’t even any smoke coming from the oven anymore. Clearly it had burned through the mess I’d thought I’d mostly got rid of and had nothing left to destroy. I scurried down the stairs and out into the night, thinking that I sure would rather inhale the smoke promised by the scheduled clean time than the smoke currently circulating in my lungs.

After being fed and petted by the lovely Claire, I returned home a couple hours later to a stinky icebox. The oven was now clean, but my entire apartment stank of smoke and what smelled like burned plastic. It had got in my clothes, my furniture, my walls. Fearing I would need to fumigate the whole damn place, I left all the windows wide open for the night, but of course this is late November and it is decidedly Not Warm. I got ready for bed with the same grim determination seen in Arctic explorers: I will survive this night, I will survive this night. I piled on layers of socks and sweatshirts and my winter hat and added two blankets to the bed. With the sounds of city traffic blasting into my room on chilly currents of air, I shivered my way to sleep, mumbling to myself about the eternal hellfire awaiting self-cleaning ovens.

And that’s the story of how cleaning almost killed me. I will now return to my slovenly ways.

The Good, The Bad, and The Silly

Posted on November 19, 2010 by lisafindley

The Good

When I heard that the fanatical and hateful group Westboro Baptist Church was going to picket my high school in Michigan, I was dismayed. What were they doing there and why? They still haven’t said why, although considering founder Fred Phelps’ daughter was in town for a panel discussion at MSU, it seems it was a protest of opportunity. The community of East Lansing really rallied ’round. Members of the local Episcopal and Unitarian Universalist churches held a joint meeting that all East Lansing High School students were welcome to attend rather than go through the protesters and hear their hate speech. Hundreds of counterprotesters lined the streets and held up signs advocating love. And turns out only THREE members of that so-called church turned up with their “God Hates Fags” and “America is Doomed” BS. Love wins again!

The National Labor Relations Board may be moving toward once again allowing graduate students to unionize. Collective bargaining for all!

As Mike, who passed on this link, said, “Every once in a while, some fraudulent asshole does get his due.” This is especially encouraging, since all too often organizations that are meant to monitor their professions just end up protecting badly behaved members of those professions.

The Bad

Earlier this month, the white cop who shot an unarmed, restrained black man at a train station in San Francisco was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to two years in prison. The many people who found this a miscarriage of justice for the slain Oscar Grant led a peaceful protest march against racism and police brutality — and they encountered, whaddya know, police brutality. If you want to donate to the legal aid fund set up for some of those protesters, go here.

Washington State Penitentiary has hit upon a cost-saving measure: as Choire Sicha writes, lockdowns once a month drive home the point that prisons are increasingly being used solely for incarceration, and not for rehabilitation at all.

The TSA chief has been testifying in a Senate committee meeting this week that the new body scan machines or full-body pat-downs are totally worth it to stop terrorism — but as this Newsweek article points out, this doesn’t take into account the many survivors of sexual assault who want or need to fly and will find these procedures genuinely traumatic. The last time I flew, they had a regular metal detector set up next to the body scan machine but they were sending every passenger through the body scan machine, and when I asked the TSA officer if I could just go through the metal detector, he said no, he’d have to get someone to do a pat-down search of me if I wasn’t doing the body scan. Then why have the metal detector at all? Seems that actual policy is to only send some individuals through the body scan machine, so why didn’t a TSA officer at a major airport like O’Hare know that? None of this makes me feel more secure about flying. Does it make anyone feel secure? (Via Shakesville)

The Silly

Sessily sent me the link to this t-shirt, which shows the part of Illinois that is Chicago, and the part of Illinois that all the suburbanites claim is part of Chicago so that when they meet people they can say “I’m from Chicago.” Dig it! There should be one for Detroit too (Grosse Pointers, Bloomfield Hillsians, etc., I’m looking at you!).

A Celebratory Thing

Posted on November 16, 2010 by lisafindley

I read another write-up on M.I.A. and was struck by her final quote:

“I don’t know why it’s not a celebratory thing, the fact that I just know about a lot of fucking shit. That’s all. Yeah so I know how billionaires live in America, and I know how poor people live in Sri Lanka, and I know how soldiers are, and I know what it feels like for your dad to throw hand grenades out of your bedroom window, I just know that. I’m not going to be able to change any of those things, and ultimately I believe in creativity. You get out what you put in, and it’s not like I only put one thing in.”

You may remember a NYT Magazine article from earlier this year that had all sorts of negative things to say about M.I.A. One of those things was that she’s a sellout for marrying rich and living in LA, and that she can’t talk about her years of living poor in London and Sri Lanka anymore. Which, as she points out in this quote, is bullshit.

She’s had years of various experiences, and she’s perfectly entitled to talk about any and all of them, just as the rest of us are. Pretending you are still living an underprivileged life is very different from continuing to speak up about the conditions of that underprivileged life, and M.I.A. is doing the latter. She has strong (and controversial) political opinions and she’s using her fame and music as a forum for talking about those opinions and drawing attention to issues she believes are under-addressed in mainstream media and hip-hop.

She knows how music works, she knows how fame works, she knows how growing up in a civil war works, she knows how art school works, and she’s weaving all these parts of her past life into her current and future life. If we’re self-aware enough, we’re all doing the same thing with our own lives; sorting through which experiences and ideas are still useful to us, which aren’t, and which we still need to process in order to determine where they fit in our life story.

I can’t argue that M.I.A. is looking to make a buck, but I’m getting so sick of people railing against musicians and authors for that. We are all trying to make a buck, and generally those artists who make a lot of money use it to continue making art. Whether the art becomes good or bad isn’t related to the fact that they made money, but what they chose to do with it once they made it. A sellout uses money to shut down their creativity, whereas a financially successful artist uses money to fuel it.

So she isn’t selling out, she’s synthesizing her life experiences into her art and creativity. We should all be so lucky. As she says, it’s “a celebratory thing.”

The Good, The Bad, and The Silly

Posted on November 12, 2010 by lisafindley

The Good

Okay, it’s not good that these wanted posters for abortion providers are making a comeback. But it is good that Flip Benham is being found guilty in a court of law for posting these dangerous, vile things.

Michelle and Barack get down in Indonesia! Love it.

I know I read in some Forster novel (I think it was Howards End) an argument among hoity-toities about the foolishness of just giving money to poor people, instead of attaching strings to tell them how to spend it. But those characters may have been on to something — apparently giving people even a dollar a day that they can spend any way they like is more effective than any other program at getting more poor kids in school, for example. Sure, some people will spend that money on drugs or drink, but so will some people who work in an office, and you don’t see us stipulating how salaries are spent. Most of the time, though, people just want money to feed, shelter, and clothe their families, and this is one way to help them do that.

The Bad

Damn it, government officials who knowingly destroy evidence of government wrongdoing should be prosecuted for their crimes, not given a free pass. But the Obama administration disagrees.

This is a month late, but it’s still worth seeing this compilation of hateful, untrue, and dangerous things that Tea Partiers have said. You know they’ll be back in 2012. Know your enemy, etc.

Oh don’t worry, John Shikmus (R-IL), who hopes to chair the House Energy Committee, reassures us, “The earth will end only when God declares its time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood.” I’m so very comforted.

The organization that Thurgood Marshall called the “uptown Klan” is funding some schools in Mississippi. Take action to ask the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools why it accredits those schools and encourage the corporations that donate to the MAIS to make sure their donations aren’t being funneled to white supremacist, anti-gay schools.

Ask the Obama administration to change its policy on not sending condolence letters to the families of servicemembers who died by suicide. (I especially like Melissa’s point that there are many deaths in the military that are called suicide that may be anything but.)

The Silly

Here’s a cool interview with Brian Eno, a man more equipped than most to coax new and interesting sounds out of any machine on hand. I like what he says about how different forms of listening to music affect how we listen to music and also the music itself, and how he’s getting more and more interested in studio sessions that don’t sound quite so perfect.

Leave your interesting links in the comments, as usual, and have a great weekend!

New Centerstage Review Up

Posted on November 11, 2010 by lisafindley

I really enjoyed “The War Plays” at The Athenaeum. It’s fun without being irrelevant or irreverent. Here’s an excerpt of my review:

“The War Plays” believes in the power of “a verifiable romance of wartime,” and it presents us with not one but three marvelous examples. Emily Schwartz’s funny and touching script is deftly handled by director Kate Nawrocki. They present a play within a play, framed by the actors welcoming the audience to a World War II London playhouse and then moving the show “underground” to the theater proper as shelter during an “air raid.” This device immediately draws the audience into the world of performers who passionately believe that no matter the outside circumstances, the show really must go on.

Interestingly, the reviewer at the Chicago Reader absolutely HATED it. I like a lot of what the Reader puts out, but this reviewer’s main complaint seemed to be that some of the songs were written after the play was set and that the play within a play concept is unrealistic if it’s set during the Blitz. These are insufficient reasons to pan a play, and ridiculously insufficient to hate it so vehemently.

But go see the play and decide for yourself!

Road Trippin’

Posted on November 9, 2010 by lisafindley

I’m sure you’ve been just as inundated as I with ads for the shitty remake-although-they-aren’t-admitting-it’s-a-remake movie Due Date, which is of course limply redoing Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, which is of course making me think of how road trip movies are always shown as wacky jaunts shot through with soul-searching and character changing. But then, I think of my most favorite road trips, and they all involved comic capers as well as a solid layer of bonding with friends or reflecting on self. That’s the eternal appeal of the road trip.

Which way? (photo by me)

There are three distinct phases of a person’s road tripping life: childhood vacations, high school wanderings, and adult road trips. When you’re crammed into the backseat of your parents’ car with obnoxious siblings and no rest stop for the next 200 miles, the journey is a trial to be endured until you reach Walley World. You have no control over the car, and very little voice in when you’ll stop to eat or sleep, so you must content yourself with playing the alphabet game and poking your sisters til they shriek. But then when you’re a high schooler, everything changes. Now you’re borrowing that same car and out with friend. You can take whatever side road strikes your fancy, because you have a game of MASH going, your best friend’s sixteenth birthday mix tape is playing, and shit, you aren’t paying for your own insurance and you’re certainly never going to die, so take that curve as fast as you like. Who cares where you’re going, so long as the radio works and school’s out.

The open road (photo from http://www.autonorth.ca)

I’m about to make a morbid leap here, but bear with me: When you’re an adult, the pleasure you derive from road tripping comes from a sense of your own mortality. Horribly aware of just how lethal cars are, you don’t drive quite so fast or recklessly as you used to (usually), and you have to wait til spring break or save up your vacation days to take the trip in the first place, so every moment matters — the journey and the destination. You can still meander from point to point, or drive through the night just to make your next stop, but either way, time is more precious now so you pay more attention to how you’re using that time.

As with most things, I have fond memories of my childhood and adolescent road trip experiences, but I like the ones I’ve had as an adult the best. It’s no secret that knowing you only have so much time here on earth can cause either a sense of panic or a sense that everything is to be savored before it’s gone. Road trips are a great way to come down on the side of savoring; hopefully you’re with people you like, and going somewhere you’ll enjoy, and in the meantime, you have time to talk, gaze at the scenery, and reflect or make jokes as you like. This isn’t the whole “it’s not the destination but the journey that matters” BS — it’s even better because they both matter! Having something to look forward to doesn’t have to distract from the excitement of the present, and enjoying where you are now shouldn’t mean you can’t plan for a great time in the future.

And yes, I just made that a bit life lesson-y, and I apologize. As penance, here are some funny road trip memories of my own.

pulling over under an underpass to avoid driving headlong into a tornado (yes, a real one)
Less than ideal weather conditions (photo by me)
taking a huge, and awesome, detour with my mom to Gettysburg on our way to Washington, D.C. during my student driving days
swerving off a two-lane highway on that detour to avoid a police car barreling straight at us, lights flashing and driver ignoring the fact that he was on the wrong side of the road
losing my innocence in a Kentucky Dairy Queen at the tender age of ten — I saw my first cockroach
singing the entirety of the “Graceland” album at maximum volume with Pam as we moseyed into Memphis
skipping Lubbock, Texas (although we do love Buddy Holly) so we could visit Cadillac Ranch and spray paint our names on the cars
approaching Mount Rushmore at dusk as the famous presidential heads glowed above us
managing to avoid certain death on Route 1 on pitch-black roads
steering with my feet from the passenger side of the car on a dirt road in rural Michigan (kids, don’t do it) (yeah, it was fun)
giving unclear directions so half our caravan for Senior Skip ended up 10 miles away from our designated rest stop and very confused
driving all night back from visiting Liz in Ithaca, New York, and then sitting in the parking lot of my freshman dorm having a heart-to-heart with my ex and incurring my mother’s wrath as the car was decidedly not returned in time for the twins to get to school
zipping along at 74 mph with Pam until a helicopter landed on the roof of her mom’s minivan — and then realizing that the helicopter was actually us with an exploded tire

Okay, so half of those were life-or-death experiences, but hey! I told you the appeal of road trips is a bit morbid. What about you — what are your favorite or just most memorable road trip memories?

Oh, Well, You Know

Posted on November 5, 2010 by lisafindley

It’s mostly bad news this week and I don’t have the heart to catalog it. But in good news, Nancy Pelosi is running for Minority Leader, which I think she deserves to win. Personally, my life is moving along quite happily, so I’m sort of focusing on that right now and trying not to get a permanent frown from reading the news.

I will leave you with this excellent categorization of animated gifs and what they bring to each occasion or sentiment (from Jezebel). It’s fun and funny, which is always a good way to start a weekend. Enjoy!

See you next week for more tales of travel.

VOTE

Posted on November 2, 2010 by lisafindley

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but on the off chance I’m not: If you’re a registered voter in these United States and you don’t want Tea Partiers running our country, please vote today. Here’s a way to look up your polling place. Or just Google “where to vote.”

Even in traditionally blue states -- so get at it!

Digby has a great piece up on why it’s important to vote Democrat this election, even though the Democrats are doing their damnedest to lose all the goodwill and progressive legislation they’ve actually gained in the last two years. Even though the Obama Administration is blocking measures to repeal DADT and carrying on with torture-as-usual established during the Bush Administration. Even though the health care bill fell far short of what it should have been. Even though we remain mired in war. Even though the White House is turning on its lefty allies in a gross misunderstanding of its base and a depressing unwillingness to see how we could all move toward the same goal (it is instead trying to get the nonpartisan vote from the Republicans that it ain’t ever gonna get).

Despite all that, the fact remains that it will be SO MUCH WORSE if the Republicans regain control. With the exception of a very few, they are eagerly pandering to racist, violent Tea Partiers who are literally up in arms about economic reform despite the fact that they are funded almost entirely by corporations with their own interests at play. People have been far too willing to dismiss the Tea Party as a bunch of nutcases, but they are getting the media coverage, they are getting their lies spread, and they are going to get possibly a frightening percentage of the vote.

But even if the Tea Party’s people don’t get all the seats they’re going for, rank and file Republicans aren’t looking much better. They’ve vowed to make “no compromise” in getting rid of the health care bill — which, flawed though it is, is still far better than anything we had before. They will block every progressive measure they can, and essentially they plan to wait til they can take the White House and Senate in 2012 and then seriously screw us over. They are anti-choice, anti-women, anti-people of color, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-working class, anti-middle class, and frankly, anti-all Americans who don’t fit a very specific picture. But they’ve scared enough people who would suffer under more of their policies into thinking they’re going to suffer more under Democratic policies.

The Democrats passed the health care bill. The Democrats passed a stimulus bill that is slowly making a real difference in regaining jobs lost in the recession. The Democrats at least half-assedly went after the banks who got us into this mess. The Democrats have let science back into the FDA’s decision making, resulting in things like the 5-day emergency contraceptive being approved. The Democrats have (not as often as they should, but fairly often) stood up against Islamophobia in places like Florida and New York. The Democrats are doggedly pursuing the DREAM Act, to open up citizenship to children of immigrants. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made huge gains in worldwide goodwill, and she has presented tough speeches and policies on the importance of women in the global economy, the autonomy of people in every culture, and the primacy of human rights on her watch.

In short, they aren’t perfect, but they are worlds better. Remove the Tea Party element and think of how the rest of the election season is being portrayed and perceived, even from Jon Stewart (damn it): That there isn’t much difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. There is, of course, a huge and dangerous difference. Remember the last time the main theme of the election season was “there isn’t much difference, just vote for whoever”? That’s right, it was the presidential race of 2000. And we all know how well that turned out.