Check it out! You can read a brand spanking new piece of mine over at Defenestration!
It’s called “The New Looks for Fall” and it’s here.
I overdid it. I always do.
Excited by my purchase last month of one of those seductive little jars of scented oil that has a handful of thin little sticks poking out of it (it made the downstairs bathroom smell like VANILLA!), I ran back to TJ MAXX and bought three more scented bottles and distributed them upstairs.
While at first I enjoyed the olfactory safari I was transported on as I roamed through the house, after a day my nose was on overload. Every time I entered a room I was hit by a different scent of artificial, manufactured tranquility. Apple! Honeysuckle! Some sort of Fall scent that smelled like juice! Disoriented, I lay down this afternoon to take a 90 minute nap and had vivid, terrifying dreams. I woke up cringing in fear to the overwhelming, incongruous scent of apple. Why did I want my room to smell like this anyway? Enough was enough.
I freaked out, collected each bottle and screwed it shut and buried them all in the back of the hall closet.
Now I relish the actual smells of our house: Coffee. Used dryer sheets. Dog. That burny smell the vacuum leaves behind. Ahhhh. That’s more like it.
Howard, Akie and I took on Kim Kardashian’s nuptials for this week’s Perpetual Post. Because we looooove her soooo much!
MOLLY SCHOEMANN: As Tolstoy liked to say, “All happy families are alike, but unhappy families are much better for ratings.” Following this principle, I can’t imagine the Kardashian Klan ever reaching a point of tranquility, since they appear to favor publicity more than anything else. There’s constant drama and heartbreak and confusion—all very conveniently made public. If questionable levels of quasi-fame is what this family is after (and it apparently is), they’re handling things the right way! After all– a loving, stable household is extremely boring to everyone outside it. Not only that, but the public doesn’t want to hear about how happy celebrities are and how well their marriages and lives are going. For one thing, it gives the rest of us one more way in which we don’t measure up to them. Also, we like gossip! And finally, why should celebrities get to have everything? They already have money, fame and endless adulation from every corner. The least they can do is show us how miserable and divisive their personal lives are! It’s the price they pay for fame, right?
This is why I have a bad feeling about the inexplicably sudden marriage of Kim Kardashian to whats-his-head. (Even though I don’t really want to waste feelings on it). The whole situation smacks of a really kind of disgusting, self-aggrandizing, and shallow publicity stunt. And really, I’m a little confused as to why the marriage of woman of mediocre talents who is famous for being famous should mean anything to anyone. After all, now Kim Kardashian is married. Does this change anything for anyone? Have the tectonic plates shifted? Do we now know what love is?
No, no, and no—and that’s going to be a problem. Kim’s played her ace with this over the top wedding stunt. The only way the Kardashians are going to stay in the spotlight is if they continue to manufacture drama, and Kim Kardashian the dull, happily married woman is not going to hold our interest for very long. There’s a reason Shakespeare’s plays tended to end with the big joyous weddings—nobody much cared what happened after that. The wedding is over—now for the irreconcilable differences.
Thanks to our country’s crumbling infrastructure, I’d like to propose the following new reality television drama for A&E:
I-85 Truckers
Watch as some of America’s toughest truckers tackle the nightmarish corridors of infamous Interstate 85! Potholes, giant fissures, abandoned mattresses, and miles with faded, unreadable yellow lines all combine to test the mettle of even the most experienced truckers. Will the ancient, rickety bridges finally collapse? Will our drivers be crushed by falling chunks of overpass?
Follow six intrepid men and women of the road as they risk their lives and their loads on creaky elevated expressways and shambling turnpikes through high mountain passes with rusted out guardrails. Will this season’s crew make it from Alabama to Virginia in one piece?
Whenever I hear Britney Spears on the radio these days, I can’t help but think of her as some sort of non-entity; a quivering mound of protoplasm in a halter top and platform sandals that bleats out lyrics every few months on command when it notices it has been placed in a recording studio. Those lyrics are then autotuned and overproduced into the familiar, record-selling sound we’ve come to expect from Britney, which is then set to a pounding house beat and released gently into its number-one slot on the billboard charts.
This train of thought led me to recall those legendary brainless, soulless chicken-substitutes that are grown in laboratories across the country and served to unsuspecting (or suspecting) patrons at KFC– which as we all know can no longer be called ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken’, as it no longer actually serves actual chickens.
Those depressing, zombie-chicken caricatures of living flesh, despite their unsavory origins, produce appealing enough fried drumsticks and meaty breaded breasts of the kind we’ve come to expect from KFC. They’re tender and juicy and utterly regulated. Superficially delicious and satisfying, they’re enjoyable in part because of their predictable sameness and dependability. They have, after all, been precisely engineered to meet our criteria for a fast, fried, chicken-y dinner of adequate taste and quality. But think too long about their origins, and you’re bound to feel a little queasy.
In a way, those sad, brainless laboratory chickens remind me of our current crop of celebrities, pop stars and prize athletes. They’ve been hand-selected by the same greedy, shadowy boards to meet our exact standards for dazzling celebrity sex appeal. Young and tender, sexy and shiny-haired yet pleasantly homogenous; while they weren’t exactly grown in laboratories, we know that they’re not naturally made, either. We know that what they say and do and the way they perform is not the genuine article. The legacies they create weren’t born of a natural wellspring of passion, creativity, or intellect. But we eat them up and follow their antics mindlessly, because they’re what we’ve come to expect, to demand. We think they’re no better than what we deserve.
Well, I’ve about had my fill of these KFcelebrities. I’m ready to bestow my interest, envy and admiration on genuine artists, writers, and other public figures who grew into fame in their own ways, in their own terms. People with real meat on their bones!
2) When someone doesn’t like a certain food or animal, it doesn’t always mean that they just haven’t tried the right KIND of food or met YOUR animal.
Some people don’t like cheese. Some people hate dogs. My initial response to both of these revelations is always acting as though some sort of gauntlet has been thrown and I must immediately rise to the challenge of changing that person’s mind. But it’s time I laid those feelings to rest.
Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, and it is not my responsibility—nor have I just been personally invited—to rock that person’s world by introducing them to the one cheese or dog that will turn their unacceptable-to-me sentiments upside-down. Yes, there are many, many kinds of cheese in the world, and maybe that person hasn’t tried St. Andres triple-crème brie (which my roommates and I used to refer to as ‘crack cheese’), and maybe that, to me, suggests that they have given up on cheese with a prematurity that verges on tragic. But I do not need to prosthelytize so heartily. I can enjoy cheese just as much even knowing that there are people out there who do not like it. After all, that does ultimately mean that there is more cheese for me. So why complain!
Not only that, but the few foods I actively dislike, such as crab and okra, I will vehemently refuse to try in any new and exciting flavor combinations or old family recipes. I just don’t like them, ok? While I understand objectively that it is in fact delicious, the very taste of crab makes me sick because of this one time when I ate crab stuffed shrimp and was then violently ill for several hours. And okra, even deliciously fried, has a squishy, slippery texture I despise. So quit asking, ok? Trust me to know what I like and don’t.
This revelation may or may not have been prompted by the time I insisted that my coworker try black olives, which he had not had in years, but recalled disliking. As he raced to the bathroom, I wondered what had been the point in forcing him to eat a food he was pretty sure he hated. When you get right down to it, the only real motivation in such situations is the desire to be right; to have someone turn to you and say, “Wow, actually these ARE good! What was I thinking all those years?” But when you run the risk of having a subject turn to you and say woundedly, “Why? Oh God, why?” as he chokes on his own bile—well, was it really worth it? There are better things to be right about. And ultimately, is someone else’s unexpected enjoyment of a food that you enjoy all that personally fulfilling?
So it goes with animals. If someone is terrified of dogs, most likely because of some early childhood experience which left them heavily scarred, there is no need for you to make statements along the lines of, ‘But my dog is so sweet and gentle—you’ll love him!’ He’s still a dog, yes? Then he’s terrifying to this person. It doesn’t matter if he’s going to mix your friend a martini or present her with $25 gift card to Target. She won’t think he’s cute. She won’t want to pet him. He won’t change her mind, and she doesn’t want to meet him.
Finally, just because you are not personally responsible for changing people’s minds about things they doesn’t like, doesn’t mean that they are doomed to wander through the rest of their days constantly missing out on the opportunity to eat pickles. I myself used to hate shrimp, and eventually I tried eating them and gradually learned to love them. And it wasn’t because one day someone skewered a shrimp on a toothpick and put it in my face at a cocktail party and made me gag it down until I realized how great it was. It was because I made the decision myself to learn to like shrimp. You can lead a person to foods they hate, but only they can decide whether or not that is going to change. Trust them to know when the time is right to expand their tastes.
I Heard Tell 