Dudes

With the exception of the boy, the last few months have been filled with me expressing disgust at general dude behaviour.  That isn’t my fault!  Everyone has been inundating me with stories and examples of men doing gross, unethical things.  I’ve also had to play mother hen for some of my younger girls who’ve yet to develop the assertiveness to say no to creeps, and has led to me witness the yuckier side of dudes who insist on thinking with their pricks.  All this has resulted in me to making wild pronouncements about how all men are disgusting etc, only half joking.  I was definitely feeling a little disillusioned, a feeling matched only by that time when I was about 18, and all my girlfriends and I were just discovering that middle aged men think it is perfectly acceptable to hit on young girls.  And when I say “hit on”, I mean request blow jobs even though they may previously have been a father figure/friend of the family/married/had children about the same age as us- and worse.

Yesterday afternoon while drifting about Chinatown with Sohi it occurred to me that I was perhaps being a little over-dramatic with my disgust.  She was relating a story about some man who tried to strike up a conversation with the opening line “So, are you Chinese or Korean?”  Sohi, who is neither, and a better human than me am in every respect, seemed mostly to object that this man bypassed all the preliminaries that are necessary to start a friendly chat, and not that he was possibly an Asian (or in Sohi’s case, Eurasian) fetishist looking for easy sex.  That last part possibly sums up my deeply suspicious nature and my reaction to any dude who tries that angle (which is often by the way- I just assumed this was something all Asian women dealt with).  Although my assesment is probably mostly true, it is also unfair. Anyway, I figured I should probably start behaving as if dudes are just, you know, trying to be friendly (misguidedly) without immediately assuming they have some evil agenda dictated by their cocks looking for a Bai Ling fantasy.  Unless they skeeve me out.

In slightly more general dude musings, I’ve been wondering for months now about the bizarre fantasy world dudes must occupy when they’re straight and interact with the opposite sex.  For instance, during my time in hospitality I’ve noticed men of all ages and cultures seem to believe that if a female under the age of 40 is serving them, this is somehow an act of flirtation- an offering, and therefore they are there for the theoretical-taking.  It seems to be subconscious and mostly harmless; jokes about how their wives would “never do this for them anymore”, jokes at the expense of a single mate about how their waitress is his new girlfriend or girlfriend-substitute.  One of the more bizarre variations of this was an encounter with a tipsy Asian businessman who constantly tried to hug and kiss the hand of every waitress on the floor, and who at one point insisted on escorting me princess-style up a flight of stairs (my left hand resting on his right), after which he thought he’d done the leg work to make a move.  Often it’s not as obvious as that, just a certain expectation that it’s in the job description to flirt.  So you do: you laugh and smile and respond as if you haven’t heard the same inane comments and jokes ten million times before.  Maybe it’s not gender specific, I can’t say since I’m not a dude serving women, but I can’t imagine females automatically behaving as if service and sex are synonymous.  I’ve brought this up with a few people and no one seems to think it is as weird as I do, so maybe I am the only one who finds this… perplexing.

Interesting Palates

Me: Should I have peanut butter with this apple?
Sohi: Peanut butter? I’ve never had peanut butter with apple before.
Me: It’s really yummy. Sometimes that combo is good with cheese as well.
Sohi: I’ve never had peanut butter with apple. I like peanut butter and carrot.
Me: Yeeeah, I could see how that might work. I’d have to try it though.
Sohi: and sultanas
Me: Oh, actually that sounds really good.
Sohi: Carrot, peanut butter, sultanas and scrambled eggs on a bagel.
Me: Oh that sounds really- wait, what?!
Sohi: Grated carrot, scrambled eggs and sultanas on a bagel smeared with peanut butter. It’s really good.

Yeah, I know, our conversations are scintillating. Anyhow

1) I really like the stuff Sohi cooks, and she has a good palate so I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt on this one.  I’m now wondering if I should make a trip to Glicks so I can try this out tomorrow.

2) I realised last night that Sohi knows lots of useful things about everything… and I know lots of useless drivel about trivial things.  That is also a reason I should trust that she’s correct about this peanut butter, carrot, egg bagel of hers- or as she might say, I should trust, epistemically, that she knows better.

BEEF

Staff dinner is at 5. After running up and down the stairs ten million times, we’re usually all starving by 9pm. So when the kitchen accidentally made a double order of beef at 10pm tonight, my girls* acted like all their Christmases had come at once.  They were so excited they pulled me aside and was like “Jennifer! There’s BEEF. Go eat some BEEF!! It’s delicious, and it’s still hot, and it’s BEEF”. I went to the little alcove they’d hidden the dish, and I found almost all of them huddled around stuffing their faces, looking ridiculously pleased with themselves.  I can set my watch to the stomach of one of my girls*- it starts to growl at 9pm on the dot without fail. I have to allocate time for her to sneak into the kitchen to steal some food, or endure forlorn looks for the rest of the night.

Seriously, have I ever mentioned how much I love my girls?*, because I adore them and I tell them so all the time.  Tonight I told one of them I loved her and could we please get married?, and then I told another that she was adorable and could I adopt her? Because they’re all used to me saying weird shit to them, they take these comments all in stride. Girl 2 was like, “sure, shall I be your daughter or your sister?” Peeps, I absolutely want her to be my little sister, she is so freaking cute- she has dimples! Who can resist dimples?!

*my girls are not actually all girls. A good proportion are male. Aaaand most of the girls are my age or older, so this description is a tad patronising, HOWEVER, at some point they all become “my girls” regardless of gender or age. They all get used to it.

Saturday Night

A bunch of us went for breakfast yesterday morning, and a friend who knew I’d had an awful Saturday night asked me what happened.  I put my head in hands and mumbled that I didn’t want to talk about it, to which one of the guys at the table lifted his hand for a high five.  The more I think about it, the more that makes me laugh, so forever more I’m going to pretend that last Saturday night was that kind of night and absolutely warranted a high five.

Twisted

Quick elaboration on previous post about people who are unable to straight-forwardly state their desires etc., I’m going to make a broad generalisation and it’ll be perfectly acceptable, because it’s about white people.  The reason I wrote that post (the “What I want” post) in the first place was my frustration with meeting all these people recently who were just totally incapable of saying the simplest things.  I finally noticed on the weekend that all these people had one thing in common: they were super whiteys. Really white, really uptight, definitely repressed, and completely and utterly unaware of how tightly wound they are.

I have two people in my life who have spent years going on and on about having to interact with this breed of whitey, and honestly I always thought they were being overly dramatic.  I’ve met some of the people they complained about, and from my brief encounters with them, I just thought they were extremely nice and polite, although perhaps overly conscientious and delicate about topics that were potentially taboo.  However, I get their frustration now. Oh, how I GET IT.

The thing about this particular brand of politeness is that everything comes out… twisted.  Everything, even “pass the salt” is an expression of their fear that they’ll reveal, like everyone else in the entire world, they care about themselves first.  It’s so bizarre- it’s like they have such a strong sense of entitlement they don’t know how to deal with it, so they do anything not to show it.  It’s kind of why political correctness is so uncomfortable, it’s not an act of respect as much as it is a display of fearfulness that they may actually have to engage with something that is outside their comfort zone.  Like throwing up their hands and going “it’s ok, I used the right word!”  I used to think that fear was kind of cute, but when you get down to it, the over-determined delicacy ruins the intent.  It is not fucking cute, it is annoying.

Hubris

I’m going to apologise in advance for this post, because it’s a total waste of time. Mine and yours. I’m just so fucking bored. I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, and to suddenly be thrown into an incredibly slow week is completely unbearable.  However because it’s such a slow week, anytime real work comes along I get resentful that it it’s impinging on my bored time.  Don’t get my hopes up with real work if you’re not going to follow through and keep me occupied!  Hayley knows how ridiculous I’m being since she got to endure my grumpiness in person on Monday night.  I never thought I’d say this, but I really want to be busy and a tiny bit stressed when I’m at work. Work time should be work time, so that play time can be more fun!  I don’t need any of this limbo crap my work life periodically throws at me.  I was so bored last night I spent a good hour reading web comics because I’d run out of things to do and we were really quiet.

Butt-in from Real World: Yeah, so after I wrote that first paragraph, the universe seemed to want to punish me for tempting fate and rained down a bunch of shit on my head from about every quarter in my life. Well done universe I commend you, for I have well and truly learnt my lesson.

Since it would be desperate, morose, not to mention unnecessary to talk specifics of my day on this thing (well, more so than usual anyhow) I’ve decided I should finish the post with a list of things I have done to keep myself occupied when bored at work:

1)  Joined Twitter/Maintained Blog – I am however grateful for twitter since I get to “msg” my sisters throughout the day, something we normally couldn’t do since we all live on different continents.

2) Pretended I was long jumper – there’s a really long concretey strip that one day when I had too much energy looked really enticing, so I did the whole run-up and then those three long stridey leaps before doing a pathetic little jump to end.  I did this for about thirty minutes before I got tired of that activity, and the next day I could barely walk.

3) Wrote a staff manual. It was full of “useful” tips that could double as a handbook for a sociopath. I have yet to hand it out.

4) Practiced pouring 30ml shots of water by eye.

5) Flossed and brushed teeth. Dental hygiene is important y’all.  I don’t know if I should be weirded out by the fact that everyone I work with has seen me flossing and brushing at least once.

6) Wall Push Ups

7) Gone into the staff bathroom (it’s pretty big) and have a dance.  I do this pretty much every day.  At some point, I lock myself in and do a berserk little dance.  This also has spilled home.  When people call and ask what I’m doing on Sunday mornings, I usually answer “nothing, just pottering around, cleaning”.  But there’s a good chance that I’m really in the middle of a strange little dance in my underwear.

I was going to go to 10 but I’m tired, and I want to go to bed, so that’s it. Surly Jen is going to crawl herself into her nice warm bed, say goodnight to Gumby and pray for a better day tomorrow. Fin.

What I want

Last night I deftly managed to get both Bel and Sohi to come out and have dinner with me.  By which I mean I bribed Sohi with a trip to Naturally on High and then got her to subsequently spend the whole day with me, and I threatened B that I’d stab her if she didn’t come.  My problem is that I’m far too accustomed to commanding people to do things… and having them comply.  I have all this misplaced confidence apparently, that I’m allowed to behave like this.  However at least no one will ever be left dangling wondering what I want, because trust me, I’ll tell them.

It’s fascinating watching how people go about getting the things that they want, it tends to say quite a lot about the person.  In my case, the fact that I feel entitled to command and tell people what I want, probably exposes how spoilt I am, and how willing people have been to simply accommodate me.  I have another means of getting what I want, which has really been the classic Jen move: being the good girl.  When you’re really nice and lovely and accommodating yourself, people are much more willing to go out of their way to help you.  It’s a two pronged attack really, with a good measure of arrogance thrown in.  My brother on the other hand is a classic wheedler.  His method is really successful because he does it with so much cheek and panache- I’m telling you, the boy is charming when he wants to be.

Watching kids go about getting what they want is the most fascinating of all.  They all learn how to manipulate from such a young age, it’s a beautiful thing.  Niece #1 is sooo clever, I’ve seen her come out with lies with just the right amount of truth as to confuse, and she adjusts her approach according to who she’s speaking to.  Her method is a mixture of the “good girl”, the “look how cute I am” and the “sneaky manipulator”.  In comparison  Niece #3, who is much younger than #1 does the most glorious, hilarious sad face whenever she doesn’t get her way; every muscle in her face moves slowly and independently of each other to form this droopy, sulky face just before she’s about to let out a wail.  It’s such a clean expression of her desires I almost want to reward her for it every time.

It’s now I admit that I really admire people who are really upfront and straightforward about what they want.  People who passively hover waiting for the other person to guess, or who twistedly try to manipulate others to offer what they want, drive me insane.  I just… don’t understand them, and I am incapable of humoring them.  Even when I know what they want, I ignore all the hints unless they outright come out and say it.  I just can’t be friends with people who are incapable of voicing their desires.  It is possible to be upfront while being diplomatic and polite people.  I really want to know, is everyone in the world taught that the way to get what you really want is to ask backwards?  To passive aggressively suggest and suggest and suggest, and then back away if the suggestion is in any way selfish?  This is tiring. Stop it.

On a completely separate note, in between talking about zionists, the show none of us has actually seen (Masterchef- according to Sohi most people shouldn’t feel betrayed by the judges based on the idea that epistemically the judges know better), zionists, how demanding, cocky and lame I’ve become, zionists, and some other sad shit, the topic of babies and whether we’d birth a child if one of us accidentally got pregnant now, came up at dinner last night.  Suddenly I had this image of the three of us with little babies, and I had this gross girly moment internally where I really really wanted us to have kids at the same time so they’d grow up together and we’d all collectively be awesome.  It was such a golden moment I had to myself, so completely rooted in fantasy that I wanna keep it, except that it is so darn creepy.  I’m going to email them both now and let them know that if they decide to move overseas I’m going to follow them.  Because they need to know how creepy and possessive my feelings are towards them.

Join Me

Just wanted to tell you all that if you want to hang out with me, I insist it be in the middle of the day in my bed. Yes that’s right, my bed. We will loll and sip tea and chat, and just… lie in my bed.  My bed is seriously the best place on the planet, only made more awesome by inhabiting it in the middle of the day when everyone else is at work.  I’ve always known it was pretty boss, but its true nature was only revealed to me when I snuck home on Tuesday to drop off my new chair, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to nap for 30mins (I didn’t have to be back at work until dinner…).  Nothing is better than some illicit bed snuggling at 3pm when everyone else is miserable at work, with nice afternoon light coming through the window.  I’m serious. Everyone is to spend time with me in my bed from now on. I’ve decreed it.

Meanwhile, I still haven’t given up the laptop, because things keep popping up at work- at this rate I’m never going to get it repaired…

Possibly Pathological

I had to trek into stupid Chadstone (shopping centre) this morning to get my laptop looked at by an Apple “genius”, who told me what I already knew, which is that it needs to be repaired (the screen has been playing up). They also told me there is a two to three week turnaround which is less than ideal since I do everything on this machine work-wise.

Getting up at my version of the crack of dawn (7:30am) to take a tram and a bus into the “fashion capital” wasn’t all crap however, since I got to window shop a little, at a time when there weren’t too many gross people around.  Does anyone else feel like their entire lives could be different when they walk through a homewares store?  I browsed through about five of these bizarre havens of whiteness- and I mean white, literally and figuratively, and was simultaneously freaked out and seduced into thinking stuff like: “what my life really needs is a spatula with tiny porcelain sparrows attached to its end”.

Even more scary than the homeware shops, was when I told one of the shop assistants that I had just moved and I was looking to decorate my place entirely in different shades of green.  This is patently untrue in every respect, and as soon as it came out I wondered why the hell I said it.  It was then that I realised I actually do that a lot when I’m shopping: if I’m forced to make small talk with shop assistants, chances are I’ll make stuff up, either to get them to leave me alone, or if they’re nice, to be polite.  This shopping induced lying may have begun with the “what postcode do you live in” question that mall shop assistants love to throw at you.  I pretty much always provide a random 4 digit number starting with a 3, because I object to the fact that someone wants to know, but I don’t want to be rude.   Even though it would just be easier to give them my real postcode, particularly when I look like an idiot if I’m unable to clarify what suburb the top-of-the-head postcode is connected to.

Somehow that has morphed into fake backstories for myself.  I want to state here that I don’t plan it, it just happens.  In fact until this morning, I didn’t even notice I did it.  Past imaginary reasons for browsing or buying things include: “I need to buy a gift for the lesbian lover I don’t have, because we had an argument” (that I was a fake lesbian was crucial to the lie you see), “this would be perfect for my non-existent younger sister”, and even “I can’t buy anything made of tin because I’m allergic to iron-alloys”.  I’m not even sure if the last one is a logical statement to make, but I believe I said it in order to fend off the pushiest shop assistant in the history of pushy shop assistants.  It was also clear to both of us that I was lying since I had touched numerous objects made of tin before I said it.

When it comes down to it though, it’s pretty difficult to rationalise this odd one-sided parody of social niceties I’ve apparently been enacting for ages.  Now I’ve just got to decide if I should purge it out of my system or embrace it.

Also, I’ll be giving up my laptop this Sunday, so I wouldn’t bother emailing/facebooking me for the next couple of weeks.

Vision

I have a love for talent based reality tv shows.  The ones where even though the audience seemingly gets the opportunity to see the artistic working process, the show in fact just enhances its mysticism.  Project Runway and Top Chef do this for me. Contestants are given ridiculous parameters and tight schedules, and more than the drama of stress induced squabbling, the best parts of these shows are when you’re wowed by some contestant’s ingenuity and talent.

I bring it up because the more I watch the now many incarnations of Project Runway (Canada is awesome, yo) the more problems I have with the judging process, which increasingly pretends that it can be an objective and quantifiable process.  Perhaps this is a result of having to edit possibly lengthy conversations about deserving winners/losers into short soundbites that make it sound like the judges have a consensus, and thereby convince the audience that their decision is ultimately the right one, however, I still find listening to them irritatingly condescending and disgustingly predictable.

My beef with almost all Project Runway judges is that they like to pretend that a unique, creative vision (someone able to “push the boundaries” and pave the way for the future of fashion) is tantamount, behaving as if commercial, approachable fashion is unimportant, while consistently touting sellability/wearability as king.  Generally this plays out by endlessly praising (albeit) talented designers who have worked with/or who are inspired by Vivienne Westwood, Alexander Mcqueenesque figures, but often awarding challenge wins to those who have the most commercial appeal, and throwing out contestants who dare to be different, but who are not sufficiently and obviously avant-garde.

I’m a huge, huge fan of Westwood and her ilk, but there are also so many different sorts of interesting designers out there who produce amazing things that are not immediately apparent or comprehensible, and do not announce this loudly. If we’re looking at the big names, then Prada comes to mind. She is consistently lauded as being at the forefront of fashion, but I’d argue not only does she have a much quieter design aesthetic than Westwood, but her shows, and her ideas I think are often very anti-fashion.  Prada’s “cool” comes from a true nonchalance that eschews the necessity to be beautiful, alluring or attractive.  A few seasons ago Prada styled a show with an intense dowdiness; all the models were clothed in ill fitting, oversized clothes, in if memory serves, unflattering and strangely fake looking tan leather.  The ubiquitous peasant skirt that was hugely popular a few years before that was a descendant of a Prada show skirt that in its original incarnation, dare I say it, was not avant-garde, nor wearable or flattering.

My argument is therefore this: I don’t always expect wearability from a designer, and I don’t expect this fact to have to be announced to me with a lot of fanfare and frou frou styling.  While I believe that some designers are “artists”, I’m also aware that their success is still based on their commercial viability.  However, particularly in a show context, wearability shouldn’t have to be presented by those who create it. Which to some degree is what happens in the real industry: a (deliberately) unwearable idea gets played with by other designers, by the original designer or design house, by the high street, by the consumers, by the magazines. It’s why I love fashion so much, you get presented with these amazing creations, and you get to play around with them, perhaps in a watered down, mutated, often bastardized form- but you get to play.  What other art form is as available to its admirers than fashion?

Which is why as much as I love Project Runway, I find listening to the judging process irritating.  1) Ugliness, even dowdiness has its place in fashion: stop throwing out contestants because they’ve produced an unflattering looking pant that everyone ends up wearing in six months time.  Fashion loves unflattering silouhettes, why are we pretending otherwise? 2) Fashion forward doesn’t have to automatically equal Westwood, please let’s move on.   3) Also let’s not pretend that fashion is not grounded by commericial concerns if you can’t stop talking about it. On a separate, but related note: I wish designers would stop crying plagarism- all designers are plagarists so they should stop being all hoity toity about the high street. If the design has hit the high street, it’s pretty likely it has already been devalued anyway, so it’s a bit of a moot point.  You only need a d-list celeb to wear a hot dress before a trend dies in the arse, so I really don’t think the high street is entirely to blame.  The high street store, for better or worse, is now just as important to the evolution of the trend cycle as the almighty Lagerfeld himself, deal with it.