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I don’t really enjoy Feministe, but there is an excellent post on their blog titled, “Criticizing the things you love”. As a pop-culture junkie and someone who doesn’t like ignoring the “minor” things that degrade something wonderful, I can really identify with the author’s feelings.

It’s an eternal struggle - when is it o.k. to overlook something that stands out as sexist, racist, stupid, or objectionable? How guilty should I feel for liking Speedy Gonzalez? Everyone has a different answer and not all of them are right. I liked her explanation; you don’t keep quiet about it. You point out what you like and you point out what you don’t like. There is precious little in this world that can be loved unconditionally.

“And you think Rockford Files is cool - But there are some things that you would change - If it were up to you”

- Ben Folds Five

7 dead as Mississippi River bridge falls amid rush hour in Minneapolis

Why did this happen?

I am not familiar with the intricacies of bridge architecture or the public laws surrounding its maintenance. I know construction work was taking place on the bridge at the time of the collapse, but the authorities in Minnesota are claiming that the work had nothing to do with the bridge’s structural integrity.

Was this not something the local/state/federal government knew was coming? Something they could not have predicted? Who was in charge of checking? I’m asking these questions genuinely because, although they seem like they should have simple answers, they may not. Maybe the structural problems of the bridge weren’t easy to identify; maybe it was decaying and crumbling from within. Still… it seems like something should have been happening that wasn’t.

My goal in these questions, rather than try to figure out who to blame, is really to understand more about the circumstances surrounding the situation. If anyone reading this post knows about any of these things, I encourage you to leave a comment pointing me in the right educational direction.

Maybe this will encourage New York State to be more serious about replacing/rebuilding the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Always Apologize, Always Explain

That is the link to an excellent article on CNN.com today about the art of apologizing. The author, Martha Beck, has said everything I’ve been trying to express to my boyfriend for the last 5 years.

In my own, personal experience, it seems men have more difficulty apologizing than women. I’m not saying that women are great at apologizing, or that men who do genuinely apologize for their mistakes on a regular basis are fictional, just that it seems more difficult for them on a personal level. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but I would guess it has something to do with pride, with feeling like admitting to their mistakes makes them seem like a weaker, more fallible person, or just that it’s about maintaining their status and power in a relationship.

Regardless of the reason, this is one of the best articles I’ve read that outlines the situation (in a gender-neutral way) and gives a practical, straight-forward explanation as to why a genuine apology, however seemingly insignificant, is very important.

The introduction to the piece evaluates that stupid fucking line from Love Story - “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” - although Beck’s point was already made by Lisa Simpson several years ago.

I don’t care how much you love someone else. Somewhere down the line, you’re going to make a mistake, and you’re going to need to apologize for that mistake to maintain a healthy, functioning relationship. Beck makes an important point by saying that you shouldn’t be constantly apologizing; apologies should always reflect the idea that you (and you alone) are truly sorry for what you did or said.

Empty, useless apologies can often be more hurtful than not apologizing at all because it’s just showing the other person that you have no intention of listening to what they have to say and just want them to be quiet. I certainly find them much more frustrating, especially since it’s pretty easy to identify when someone is just jerking you around and isn’t actually repenting.

I have my own set of problems, but apologizing when I feel that I have done something wrong is not one of them. If you feel this is something you have difficulty with, or know someone who does, I encourage you to take a look.

You… won’t… be… come on, you know what’s coming….

SORRY!

Ha. I’m sure me and 9 million other people have made that original, hilarious joke.

P.S. - The wording in the article is not gender-neutral; the author writes the article with the goal of speaking to women who are apologizing to men. What I mean when I say this is that I feel the advice works well for both men and women.

I haven’t been around online lately. No real reason for this other than general exhaustion. I certainly have been sleeping a lot. Anyway, I wanted to at the very least mention some of the recent news pieces I’ve seen that caught my attention.

- Girl’s feet severed on ride at Six Flags : Hating roller coasters, I’ve never been on one of these Tower of Terror/Freefall rides where the enjoyment of the thing comes from the sick feeling you get in your stomach. When is Six Flags going to learn that naming their rides after Superman seems to increase the probability that something bad is going to happen?

- We, the two-headed snake, dies : Several things struck me about this snake other than the fact that it was generally an anomaly. 1) It lived for 8 years when most two-headed snakes die within weeks of birth. 2) The heartbreaking description of how We’s two heads would struggle to slither in two divergent directions. Sounds like such a sad existence. I find snakes as unsettling as the next person commonly does, but this was interesting.

- Mythic Creatures exhibit at the Museum of Natural History : I haven’t seen it yet, but I really want to. I hear tell of Giant Squid/Kraken inclusion, information that is verified by the website. Suffice it to say, I’ll be very excited to go.

- Bone Cracking Ancient Wolves : The more we learn about history, the more I believe that the creatures we once thought to be ‘mythic’ may truly have existed.

So much more has happened in the world and I haven’t been able to comment on it. Hopefully I’ll have caught up on my super-exhaustion soon.

If you hate doing it as much as I do, you’ve probably wondered the same thing yourself. It’s fucking stupid. I only do it when suckered into it or when feeling particularly insecure. The information below is interesting. Enjoy.

From The Straight Dope:

I knew if I procrastinated long enough on this often-asked question somebody would eventually do the legwork for me. Sure enough, Pete Cook of Chicago has sent me a 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture.”

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.)

The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

For the remainder of the piece, which I assure you is very interesting, click the link above.

… and here’s a fun site to browse, if the mood strikes you:

Beauty and Hygiene Advertisements from the 1920’s to the 1950’s

So I went sight-seeing in my own neighborhood today. Well, that’s a misstatement. I went sight-seeing in Manhattan today. It’s amazing how lazy people can be when they have something right at their fingertips. Most days I rarely venture out of my own little living section of the city. I have still yet to travel to Brooklyn.

Today I went to Chinatown for the first time, City Hall, the Court and Federal buildings, and the South Street Seaport. I was excited to go to Chinatown because I have wanted to go for a long time. Trying to get into the spirit of a day of exploration, I ate a slice of salted peach. I did not enjoy it. I bought some red bean rice cake, as well as a strawberry rice cake to have at a later time. I searched fruitlessly for a place to buy incense. One of the major disadvantages of being in Chinatown and not speaking Chinese is that the signs for the majority of the stores are in Chinese, so it’s hard to find anything specific unless you already know where it is.

Now the goal of my next day-tripping excursion will be to explore some of the West Side neighborhoods.

In closing, I’ve started drinking seltzer water to replace my constant reliance on and craving for soda. I am always desiring something sweet to drink. The seltzer water has pretty much nothing in it, other than carbonation and natural flavoring, so it’s much better for me and it tricks my body into thinking I’m drinking something other than water. I endorse the habit, and I recommend it to anyone else who knows they drink too much soda. Bon petites vacances.

Taxi patrons, on a by and large basis, don’t seem to buckle in. In my experience, they ignore the available seatbelt, despite the fact that a lot of the cabs I’ve been in are cartoonishly dangerous modes of transportation. I’m guilty of this too, which is particularly shame-inducing because I’m otherwise vigilant about wearing a seatbelt in whatever car I’m in. Not vigilant enough, obviously.

From The Gothamist, quoted from a NY SUN article:

In accidents, yellow cab passengers wearing seatbelts are twice as likely to sustain serious or fatal injuries as seatbelt-wearing riders of other vehicles, according to a 2006 city-commissioned study by Brooklyn-based Schaller Consulting. This gap, which is even wider among non-restrained passengers, could be “linked to the presence of partitions in most medallion cabs, which introduce a very hard surface in an otherwise cushioned environment,” the study said.

So, logically, it makes even less sense to avoid wearing a seatbelt in a taxi cab since the likelihood of injury is high. Amusingly (or unsettlingly) enough, if you’re in a cab with a partition it seems that wearing your seatbelt won’t even prevent you from experiencing some form of injury. You’re still likely to slam into the giant transparent board glued precariously in front of your face. Ah, automotive transportation - how do you manage to quell our reasonable fears with your thready siren song?

I think it’s clear that, more than ever, we need self-sustaining, non-polluting water powered cars whose exteriors are a soft cushion formed from marshmallow essence, bits of cloud, and rubber. Let’s get on this, people.

I overuse the word wonderful because it’s the perfect descriptor for the feeling it represents.

The trend will probably continue.

My congestion developed into a full fledged sinus infection, so I spent my New Year’s Eve uneventfully. In the earlier portion of the day, we went to see Avenue Q with my visiting sisters and their friends. I enjoyed some of the songs a lot, but overall I wasn’t bowled over by the play. Getting out was uncomfortable given the theatre’s proximity to Times Square, which was already jammed full of thousands of people. One of the disadvantages (or advantages, depending on what kind of person you are) of living in this area.

Christmas was exhausting and short. This has been a rough year on myself and my family. I want to say that I hope next year will be different, but I don’t know if I do. Bad things are bound to happen and everyone is going to operate on a flux of positive and negative events that unfold in their life; I guess I just don’t want things to get any worse. Thinking about what I want for the next year fills me with anxiety, dread, and memories of what happened at the beginning of last year. I know that I never want to have another breakdown. That’s one desire I’m extremely sure of.

I start work on Tuesday. Not having the proper identification makes me nervous since he expressly mentioned it when I was leaving the interview. Not that I’m going to let it undermine my confidence. New things are stressful; at least it corresponds with the ‘new year’, new everything else.

My thoughts are few and far between regarding this blog. I’ll write more when I feel there’s a reason to. I just didn’t want to fall into disrepair. Happy new year.

That time of the winter has come and my sinus’ are blocked. It’s miserable. I had so much trouble sleeping last night. After a while, I was so desperate to go to sleep, I got up and took the nasal irrigation kit my mother got me and went to the bathroom to try it. I have to say that it helped. Not as much as I hoped it would, though. It’s a weird sensation. All my specific kit consists of is a bottle with an adjustible spout that you fill with warm water. Then you take a packet of saline solution, pour it in, seal the bottle, and shake it up. Once the bottle is shaken, you lean over your sink or water catching recepticle and open your mouth. You position the spout in one of your nostrils and then squeeze the bottle. Salty water comes rushing through your nose and there’s a little bit of pressure at first before the water pushes the mucus blocking your nose into your throat. You’re supposed to squeeze until water begins to drain out of your other nostril or your mouth.

The first time I flushed out my sinus’ I successfully cleared most of the blockage into my throat. The second time, I could barely get the water through the other nostril. It was disappointing, since irrigation is supposed to be so helpful to people who have severe sinus problems. I’m not really sure why I became congested yesterday. I do feel drained and exhausted, so I probably just contracted a virus or a cold. I hope it clears up before the weekend because there’s a lot of delicious Christmas food I want to be able to taste the flavor of.

For work, I’ve learned how to perform mail and label merges in Microsoft Word (with data from an Excel file). What a fantastically cool feature! I wish I had known how to do it a long time ago. It really does make producing mass material infinitely easier and breezier. I’m excited about the opportunity to do it at work. Now I just have to learn how to mass e-mail and I should be pretty stable on the ‘mass’ computer techniques.

I found a website with some excellent watchable Microsoft Office tutorials: Mi Stupid. I think the name of the site sucks (why would you want to alienate the people who you are trying to engage?), but the content was incredibly helpful, especially for freely disseminated information.