In Which The Writing Major Gets Indignant

I regularly listen to a podcast out of Seattle called "Too Beautiful To Live" -- TBTL for short. It's pretty cool, if you are like me and spend a lot of time driving and you think that an imaginary radio show which is basically about nothing but which is nevertheless unfailingly entertaining is a good way to spend a commute. TBTL has a blog, and a recent blog entry links to this Slate article about how the usage of language changes the meaning of words over time.

(Yes, this is probably going to be a week where I write about nothing of interest to anyone except me because I don't have any good pictures. Deal, McNeil.)

Basically, the gist of the Slate piece is that the meanings of words change when the words are used incorrectly by enough people over enough time. Not necessarily fake made-up words like "eleventy" and "stategery" and "agreeance" and "refudiate," but actual real-live words that currently exist in the English language, like "disinterested."

To quote Inigo Montoya: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

I believe that this phenomenon is referred to as "the principle of common usage." And this will come as no surprise to anyone, but I don't like it. I admit that I am something of a pedant when it comes to the English language. You might not be able to tell here on Ye Olde Blogge, because I try to write conversationally -- basically, I talk to myself when I am writing these entries, and sometimes I even talk to myself right out loud, and believe me when I say that hilarity does not always ensue, either -- but I know full well that there are Rules. Spelling, grammar, and mechanics count in real life. Anybody who tells you otherwise is at best uninformed and worst outright lying.

Look: I did not read Webster's Seventh Collegiate Dictionary in the sixth grade for my health, people.

So I suppose it goes without saying that I have Thoughts about the Slate story. Ugly thoughts, most of them involving cuss words and liberal use of pejorative terms for "persons who are not very intelligent." It's not because I disagree with the author of the article in question, either, but because I think he should fight harder to protect the legacy of the language. We all should. Words have meanings, and just because a bunch of bozos with basic-level Power Point skills think that "duly noted" means "I agree" does not make it so. Just because some wonk in a corner office thinks that it's perfectly fine to use "irregardless" with abandon does not make it a correct word.

I mean really, it's a single word with a double-negative built in. No one but me sees the problem here?

Right now, of course, I am not Mom-the-Grammar-Nazi, but believe me when I tell you that once Shae gets into elementary school and we start with the Language Arts, there will be a fairly strict enforcement of the Rules in our house. We're not going to let her slack off on the math and science homework, not if we ever expect this kid to have any part of Winning The Future, and you better believe that Spelling and Grammar and Mechanics Rules will be strictly enforced. I abandoned the "no sugar" edict ages ago, but a self-respecting Writing major must have some standards, dammit.

• Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
• Misusing "i.e." and "e.g." will be punishable by death. OK, not death, put possibly the loss of dessert.
• One space after a period in emails, two spaces after a period in academic papers, unless the assigned stylebook prescribes otherwise.
• No, you cannot use Comic Sans for your book report. What are you, a Visigoth?
• No, you cannot use 18-point type and 2-inch margins to make your paper "fit" the length requirements. Do you think I am stupid? Do you think I have never tried that myself?
• If you are talking about the liquor, it is "Scotch." If you are talking about the people, it is "Scots." Trust me on this one. Your "History of Great Britain" professor from Glasgow will not think you are funny. It doesn't matter if your MS Word grammar-checker doesn't find the error.
• Know where the quotation marks and other punctuation marks go in relation to each other. Know when quotation marks are required and when they are not. Ditto apostrophes.
• "There" does not mean "their" does not mean "they're." "Too" does not mean "to" does not mean "two." "Its" and "it's" are not interchangeable.
• Learn to properly diagram a sentence. Hardly anybody does this any more, but it is a useful skill for a writer to have, it will help you when you begin studying a second language, and it is a surprisingly effective party trick in college. Engineering and architecture majors love girls who can diagram things.
• Have at least 50 words in your vocabulary that are more than three syllables and ten letters long. Know what they mean and how to spell them, and be able to use them in a sentence. I suggest starting with "onomatopoeia" because it is highly descriptive and useful and also my very favorite word.
• If you ask me what words mean before you look them up in the dictionary, I am going to lie to you. Consider yourself warned. And yes, I will know.
• I don't care what the other kids' parents say: YOU are going to do your History report at the library, using encyclopedias that were published before you were born, exactly as God intended. Wikipedia is not a reputable source for information. Nothing on the Internet is.
• Reading the CliffsNotes is not anywhere near the same thing as reading the book itself. Are you trying to give me a stroke? No, I don't care that you think that Chaucer and Shakespeare are not written in "English."
• No Notre Dame or Yankees fans in the house. Ever. (No, this is not technically grammar-related, but it's a rule that cannot be spelled out often enough.)

Of course, I can have all the rules in the world, and none of it will change the fact that I will probably spend the rest of my career taking orders from people who don't know an ellipsis from epilepsy, and who have never even heard of subject/verb agreement, let alone know how to employ it correctly.

"Irregardless" will always make me get up and walk out of the room, though.

Standoff

You might think since it's just the Boo and me at home together at night that I would have plenty of opportunities to take just absolute buttloads of pictures, but if you did think that, then I would accuse you of being an infinitely fortunate naïf who has not done a whole hell of a lot of hard time with a three-and-a-half-year-old lately.

I mean, seriously, people: I am getting ready to get myself some prison tattoos at this point. Well, ok, maybe not prison tattoos (needles, yeuch!), but I am starting to consider maybe thinking about drawing some spider-web-like patterns on my elbows with washable markers, anyway.

Now, my daughter is, by and large, a good kid, really good, but like every preschooler everywhere ever, she is stubborn as a ram. The fact the she is an Aries does not help (although it is definitely fitting). Her routine has been changed, and it seems that she'll be damned before she changes along with it. All of us will.

We are talking knock-down, drag-out, scratching and clawing and kicking and screaming here. Crying and weeping and rending of garments. She fights me leaving school. She fights me over dinner. She fights me over potty. She fights me over bedtime. She hollers and wails for her Daddy, her Nana, her Pop-pop. She tells me she hates me. She tells me she hates SpongeBob.

(My readers who also have small children [or who are My Anonymous Mother] are all like: "Yeah? And?" and also thinking: "Bitch, please." And believe me -- I know. I can feel you practically rolling your eyes out of your heads right now. I KNOW.)

None of this would bother me so much -- because hey, I am not really happy about this either, not yet, even though I completely know these are total First World Problems, like call the whaaaaaaaaaambulance already, GOD -- but she has otherwise been, for everybody else, a perfect little angel.

That little booger.

Parsons, We Have A Problem

I would really like to know what has happened to my beloved Project Runway. Because it really isn't a very good show any more. And I, like Tim Gunn*, am concerned.

Back in the days when PR was on Bravo -- and it feels like it was hundreds of years ago, now, but it was only two years and three seasons -- PR was groundbreaking television. It was not like many other reality shows at the time: it was, is, and remained about fashion. First, last, foremost, and pretty much only about fashion.

Sure, in a competitive reality show, you're going to have some interpersonal interaction, but this was not like Survivor or Big Brother. This was a show about making great clothes. Do, or do not. There was no negotiation, no politics. There was no "voting off the island." It didn't really matter whether the rest of the designers liked you or not; at the end of each episode, you either made good stuff and stayed around, or you made crappy stuff and got sent home.

Now, I am not not naive, and I understand that people are not cast for a reality show about designing based solely and entirely on whether or not they can actually design. But since fashion is a creative industry, and what with creative people being how they are, there has been no shortage of "characters" on this show. You might have heard of one or two of them: Jay. Wendy Pepper. Austin. Santino. Jeffrey Sebelia. Christian Siriano. Laura Bennett. My favorites, Chris March and Nick Verreos. Fascinating people, every one, but they didn't do what they did because they were "popular" or "players" -- they made it, or didn't, based on their clothes.

I still think that's the case with PR, but something has changed. The show switched from Bravo to Lifetime, and I really feel like the focus of the production has shifted from "interesting people making beautiful clothes" to "a bunch of big-mouths being nasty to each other and causing drama and sometimes making something that someone in the audience would wear." There has always been some drama and nastiness -- see: Wendy Pepper, mentioned above -- but when PR started the nastiness was shocking because it seemed like such an anomaly.

(Come on, Tim Gunn has got to be one of the nicest guys on Earth. Do you think he would have signed up for this if it was going to be all drama all the time? I sure don't.)

If I had to come up with an explanation for what drove the shift from "making high-quality television" to "making highly-viewed entertainment," I would say that it came when the producers and the network changed. Now the show is produced by Bunim/Murray, the same outfit behind The "Real" World (emphasis added), and the show airs on Lifetime, the network responsible for that cinematic classic Mother May I Sleep With Danger? starring perennial Oscar-bait Tori Spelling.

And please note that I say this from a place of love, because I used to watch The Real World religiously back in the day, and I actually kind of like Tori Spelling -- but these changes blow.

Now the show is an hour and a half long, instead of just an hour, and that extra half hour? Is nothing but the designers criticizing each other's designs and basic general bitchery. It's stupid and unnecessary. Nobody looks good under these circumstances. If these people were really that good, they wouldn't need a reality show on basic cable to get people to buy their stuff. And I assure you: there are only maybe three people on this show whose clothes I would actually consider buying, and one of them has already been eliminated.

I don't know that I really have a suggestion on how the show can be fixed. I would definitely recommend cutting out the extra half hour, and maybe going back to Bravo. But I'm not sure even going back to the original homebase will help; some of the stuff that we have seen on PR is slowly creeping into other quality Bravo shows now. I don't really care how much the contestants on Top Chef hate each other -- the more I have to see the giant egos interacting, the less I feel inclined to eat at one of their restaurants. I don't want to eat where the chef doesn't respect anybody but himself.

And don't even get me started on Work of Art, which was seriously an unmitigated disaster.

Maybe what I am saying is this -- Dear Project Runway people: If you're reading this (and I doubt that you are, because you are not my mother, so why do you care?), stop with the drama! Just make clothes! You're making Tim Gunn* concerned, and I don't like it. Concerny faces give me wrinkles. Thanks! PS - Stop showing the Schick Quattro razor-trimmer commercial during PR because I really don't want to think about the shape of other women's "topiaries." Eww.


* Tim Gunn is probably not concerned, but that is what he says all the time.

Someone Send a Plunger

Someone unexpected told me yesterday that they read this blog, and when I asked them what they thought, their answer was this: "Man, what happened to all your stories?"

And to be honest, I wasn't sure what to think about that, because on the one hand, it's not like I don't write something 4-5 times a week, but on the other hand, yeah I kind of have been boring lately. I'll 'fess up to that. For a while I thought it was just the doldrums, and I still think that is part of it, but really, I think the problem is the potty training.

Because: potty training really, really sucks. And it is making me feel like a bad parent.

If you go and Google "potty training methods," you'll get about 16 million results. There are separate methods for boys and girls, one-month plans, one-week plans, one-weekend plans, one-day plans. There are books and DVD's and audio courses and special diapers and panties and cattle prods or something, I don't even know any more. I am really starting to think that there is such a thing as the "potty-industrial complex," which is on the same level as the "wedding-industrial complex" and the "beauty-industrial complex" and the "daycare-industrial complex" and all those industries exist solely to tell me what I am doing wrong.

And I am starting to believe them.

So there are no funny stories lately because there is not a whole lot of funny, because most of the conversations that I am having with my kid can be summed up as follows: me asking, "Shae, do you have to go potty?" followed by 15 minutes of screaming and tantrums and arguments and negotiations. And that's just me. Add in the random noises Shae is making and ... well, it's quite a caterwaul.

I know we'll get through this eventually, or at least I hope we will, and I think it will be sooner than later, but man oh man, right now? Agony. Everybody's mad at everybody else all the time and it's just an unpleasant place to be. She'll tell us when she has to pee, sometimes, but she never tells us when she has to poop, and we are talking split-second precision timing if we want to catch her in the act and get her to the potty on time.

If we get mad, she cries, and if we try to be firm but gentle, she doesn't seem to get it, like it's all a game, and I feel like we're being all overindulgent and blahblahblah and everything that everybody says is wrong with people of my generation who are now parents, with kids who don't have any rules or boundaries or discipline.

Then we whip ourselves up into a froth, where everybody's mad at everybody else and ... well, I already mentioned that it isn't exactly Disneyland.

So that's what happened to my stories. For a little while longer, anyway, they're being flushed.

But hey! Here are some random, entirely out of context pictures to thank you for reading this while big whiny rant.

Proof of Life

It occurred to me last night that with all the thankfulness and the whining about suddenly up and moving to one of the wings of Naxxramas and all, it's been a few days since I posted any pictures. Not that anyone is keeping track except my sister and My Anonymous Mother, of course. (Ba-dum-DUM.) But I thought it might be a good idea to offer up some photographic evidence that we are all still alive, if not necessarily well.

Here we are, rocking out as much as it is possible to do so on command, and also enjoying our butter bread and water, which is the only thing she wanted to eat for dinner last night. We got her to eat a few bites under threat of calling Santa Claus, but she's smarter than we are and would have none of it.

I won't lie: these pictures are terrible, because neither she nor I really felt like taking any pictures, but I thought it was worth confirming that rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

Send in the Clowns

(NOTE: This is long and overwrought and very emo, and possibly upsetting. This was a big ol' stream of consciousness thing that I wrote. You can skip it if you want -- the pictures aren't that great anyway. I almost didn't publish this, but I decided to anyway, for two reasons: (1) these are real feelings, and (2) I feel better for having gotten it out, which is kind of the reason why I started this blog in the first place. I'm fine. I'll be fine. I have to be, and I want to be. You can worry, but know that I have this stuff on the radar, and I am monitoring myself, and I won't actually GET out of control. I just FEEL out of control, sometimes. YMMV, and QED, and etc.)

=====

This time last year, I was was practically swimming in bliss, what with my team winning the World Series and my guy winning the election and things just generally going much more my way than things are right at this particular moment in time. I'm not exactly talking myself off the ledge, not quite, but ...

... well, let me put it this way: did you ever have one of those days when you have, like, tunnel vision, and all you can see is what's going on right in front of you, and that's probably okay anyway because what's happening off to the side there sounds a little bit terrifying, but anyway you're staring straight ahead trying to concentrate and then all of the sudden you notice that there is a very weighty darkness rapidly closing in around you and you feel this moist hot sulfurous breath on the back of your neck and then you blink and when you open your eyes all you can see is this pinpoint of light on the horizon and suddenly the panting is getting heavier behind you?

No? Just me?

G is still out of work, and right now I am the breadwinner in our family, and let me tell you something about that: my (not-so) inner feminist is at full-on DEFCON-5. It's one thing to be the moneymaker when you want to, when you and he are separate-but-equal-partners, when your marriage is new and you are both young and strong. But when you have to? When there are kids and pets and mortgage payments? When you've been constantly working for 10+ years without breaks except for the obligatory occasional week of vacation and you're old and tired? Whole 'nother ballgame, buster. This is quidditch on the moon.

The fact that there are only 40-something days until Christmas and I have barely started my shopping, barely even started thinking about my shopping, barely even started considering thinking about my shopping, probably gives away how bad things are getting, in my head at least. How can I worry about Christmas presents when I am busy worrying about how we're going to make two car payments and a mortgage payment and a daycare payment with only one job? It's come to this: I am having a hard time justifying spoiling my own child, the child we wanted so long and worked so hard for, because I just can't make the cost-benefit analysis work. Even as I say it myself, it's the saddest and stupidest thing I've ever heard.

And then I think, "If it's this bad for us, how bad must it be for others? The ones with no jobs, no severance, no unemployment, no nothing? How bad must it be for them?" And I can do something for them, I know I can, if I am willing to sacrifice some of the little bit we still have, but ... then again. Then again. They just did a round of layoffs where I work. I know I am lucky to have a job right now. I have survivor's guilt, I guess. I am becoming overwhelmed with all of it. Sometimes I worry myself right into nausea. I need to out my head between my knees. I can't hardly sleep.

I mean, maybe I exaggerate a little bit, but I am starting to hit panic mode right now and I'm not sure how to keep the sky from swirling over me while the earth spins out of control underneath my feet in this maelstrom of my own making. I am starting to crack under the pressure and I wonder sometimes if we're going to make it, G and I, our little family. I feel like I'm going looneypants. Some days I am sad, and some days I am angry, and some days it's a struggle to get out of bed, and some days I am so consumed with so many emotions at once that I force myself to feel absolutely nothing in self-defense. Fuck off, world! Die in a fire.

This is depression, probably a big one, and I know this. I can feel it like a giant octopus or a big hairy spider, twisting its legs around my ribs and squeezing until I can't run and can't move and can't breathe and can't scream. But I can't be bothered with this, I can't, I just can't be depressed right now, not with him depressed and people around me depressed and the whole damn world depressed. I'm the positive one. I'm the cockeyed optimist. I'm Little Miss Sunshine. I'm the Little Engine That Could.

And here I am, standing in the tunnel, and it's getting darker and darker and that panting behind me is getting louder and louder and that tiny point of light is getting farther and farther away and now I'm starting to hear calliope music, which means here come the horrible flesh-eating clowns, and I think it's going to be getting a lot worse before it gets better, and I'm barely hanging on to this high wire here already. Please, send help. And a flashlight.

High Art (Emphasis on the "High")

I have been having that Dream again, the one where I am standing near the stage of a high school auditorium in a pair of well-fitting jeans and bright yellow Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star low-tops and a black turtleneck with a long blue sweater-coat with what looks like deceased Muppets around the collar, and I have my hair up in a tousled yet sleek bun that manages to be messy without being bumpy, and my glasses are clear frosted rhinestone encrusted cat's-eye numbers and they look good, and I have between my fingers a long 20's-style cigarette holder and nobody is giving me any shit about smoking indoors, because I AM AN ARTISTE, dammit, and I am the director of the Best Goddamned Community Fucking Christmas Pageant Ever.

And yes, I know EXACTLY how many things are wrong with that paragraph, not the least of which is the fact that it is absolutely the run-on sentence from holy hell.

ANYWAY. One of these days I will tell you in great and embarrassing detail about TBGCFCPE, because in my head I have the whole thing planned out, but in the meantime, let me share with you someone else's Vision of Pure Entertainment Perfection:

via NPR's Monkey See Blog

I am struck, primarily, by the following:

(1) HOLY SHIT, THIS IS REAL. I mean, video of it exists on the Internet, so it HAS to be real, right?

(2) The backup dancers' outfits would make more sense if they included Solid-Gold-Dancer-style tinsel wigs instead of those ridiculous clown mops.

(3) I really, really love Florence Henderson's dress, in all seriousness, and if I could get it in my size, in a slightly more A-line cut, and with a shorter hem, I would totally wear that to the company Christmas party.

(4) You know you are a sad, irreparable dork when the woman who plays Alice, dressed as a duck, is way cooler than you are, Peter Brady.

(5) When I win the lottery and I buy my Pleasure Palace in Cabo, I am ABSOLUTELY going to make sure that I build my own personal nightclub, and it is going to look like this set.

(6) HOLY FUCKING SHIT, YOU GUYS, THIS IS FOR REAL.

(Sorry, but the Management of this Blog is unable to provide you with brain bleach after reading this post. Please consult your nearest mental health practitioner or drink Jaegermeister until you numb the pain.)

WTF!? Friday: My So-Called Life

That mess right there is my official-as-of-this-moment fall TV viewing grid, and the title of this post could also be: "OMFG, she actually watches that shit?" because -- yes. Yes I do. Somebody has to, and it might as well be me. I'm willing to take one for the team. You're welcome.

It's kind of funny -- I have a degree in writing for television, and while I don't think it's going to waste (those emails to salespeople aren't going to script themselves, you know), it's pretty fair to say that I am not "living up to my potential." Sort of makes it more ironic that a good 20% of the shows on my schedule are reality shows, no?

And anyway, this isn't the full list of what I'll be watching. Some of our regular programs (Chuck, The Closer, In Plain Sight, and Psych) are done for now and won't be back until late in the fall or early in the spring. And at least two of these shows (NCIS: LA and The Good Wife) and possibly four (Modern Family and Community) night get scrapped if we don't like them.

I also didn't include my current guilty pleasure, which is on FoodTV on ... well, I have no idea when, but my TiVo catches it, and that is what matters: What Would Brian Boitano Do Make? Holy crap, you guys. If you like funny stuff, and people with actual personalities, and cooking shows for complete dilettantes, then I recommend checking it out. It's good, and you'll actually make at least some of what they feature on the show. (Unless you're busy watching 358 hours of TV a week, most of them targeted at the pre-K demographic.)

With all of the said: is there some kind of curse on Tuesday nights or something? Are programming execs expecting the entire television audience to have MNF football hangovers? Why is there virtually nothing to watch that day? I only have two TiVo conflicts this season (Weds. at 9:00 and Thurs. at 9:30), so I'm not complaining much, but why? Why can't somebody just move those shows to Tuesdays, which are by most accounts a total wasteland?

Also, you might notice that I will only be watching one show on NBC this year, and that one is only a half-hour comedy (which, as I mentioned, might not even make the cut). This is because NBC is apparently run by brain-damaged space aliens who think that taking up five hours per week of prime-time programming with that bullshit Jay Leno program is a good idea. Dillweeds. Making me wait until March for Chuck. That is some kind of asshattery, right there, and don't think I don't notice.

(For the record, I'd skip NBC entirely until my beloved Zachary Levi comes back, but Joel McHale owns the part of my soul that doesn't already belong to Mark Burnett or Jerry Bruckheimer.)

Oh, and one more thing -- Dear Lifetime, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, BROADCAST IN HD, YOU LOONS. Project Runway is sumptuous, Tim Gunn is a demi-god who deserves better, and YOU CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FABRICS OR COLORS IN STANDARD DEFINITION. What is WRONG with you people? Those of us who followed the show from Bravo have high standards that you are not achieving. Work on it. xoxo, rockle.

So ... what are you watching?

A Kind of Hush

Oh, man, this day. We had a cruddy night last night -- it's been raining again, because the forty days and forty nights of rain we had at the beginning of the summer are meaningless without a matching weather pattern at the end, or something -- and so we're all cranky today. Plus, I am just sick to death of that stupid godawful "Go Bananas" video by the Fresh Beat Band that keeps getting played at the end of every one of Shae's Noggin programs, so we declared a moratorium on shows for the morning.

Of course, in an ironic twist of fate, or wink from God, or whatever, Shae picks today of all days to play with her Little People Noah's Ark playset. The preternaturally smart little booger.

Right now G and the Boo are taking a nap, which I was doing earlier too. All the action in the house is coming from Owen, who has been hitting the 'nip pretty hard, as captured in these terrible iPhone pictures.

I guess he found this toy under the couch or under the hutch or something. Haven't seen it in a while. I don't know where cat toys go when they go missing. Maybe with the random disappearing grapes, and that one sock from the laundry?

He bogarts the good shit.

And then he sleeps on the couch all afternoon.

WTF!? Friday PLUS Trivia: Really Bad Hair Edition

If you have welding goggles or some other kind of protective eyewear, you're going to want to put them on right about now, because jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, you are about to witness some truly bad hair. Seriously:

We could talk about the hideousness of this outfit, but I'd rather not just yet, because at the moment I am traumatized by OH MY GOD THAT FRICKIN' HAIRDO. I spent SO MANY of my formative years with my head in sponge rollers, and this is actually photographic evidence of one of the BETTER outcomes. This was considered good! Usually, my hair was flat and limp and stuck to my head within five minutes of the curlers being removed. Clearly, there was a lot of Aqua Net involved for this family portait. Or some kind of evil early Photoshop.

So, in honor of my mother's and my grandmother's dogged insistence on giving me curls (honestly, you don't even want to KNOW how many Ogilvy home perms that I had to sit through, and I actually think I've blocked at least 75% of them out, but suffice it to say that whenever I walk past a hair salon in the mall and I smell perm solution, I have 'Nam-style PTSD flashbacks), this week's trivia quiz is all about: Famous Hairdos Through The Ages. Buckle up! Can you name ...

• Three bald (or mostly bald) guys
• Three female celebrities who were known for their hairdos
• Three actors known (or reputed to be) very hairy
• Three famous haircuts
• Two actresses known for their wig lines
• Two male celebrities known for their facial hair
• Two women with weaves
• Two really awesome TV moments involving hair pulling or wig removal

Standard trivia rules apply: no Google, no cheating, no calling your stylist for hints, etc. I'll post my answers on Monday night after 5pm. Good luck!