Dear you, whoever you are,
I love letters. I love their neat and tidy formatting. The way they look laid out on a page of beautiful stationery. The shape of handwriting snaking across the page.
A lot of people love letters. And to talk about letters. They write newspaper columns, TED talks, and radio shows dedicated to the handwritten letter. It's not hard to understand why, of course. People love letters at least partly for the same reason that people love vinyl records and typewriters. They're old-fashioned enough to be cool again. A stylishly retro form of communication. Is there a word for the sensation of feeling nostalgia for a time before you were born? (Unsurprisingly it's an ailment common to history majors).
I don't love typewriters though. I don't have the same attachment to rickety clankety machinery that I do to the far older technology of flimsy pieces of paper. You can't doodle on an e-mail. You can't cover the envelope of a Facebook message with tiny cut-out snowflakes.
Now, I may be old-fashioned and fond of impracticalities (I'm the only person my age I know who writes proper cursive) but even I am not suggesting that anyone resort to letters as a primary form of communication. I'm far too addicted to my electronic forms of communication and I refuse to believe all the depressing talk that the internet is making us into a race of disconnected zombies.
I do, however, see the letter as a good deed. I, like most of humanity, feel the urge to make this seemingly endlessly sad world of ours better. I can go out and donate money and time and fight a dramatic fight against all that's wrong in the world but some days (most days) it all feels too overwhelmingly awful. On those days, I'll settle for little acts of kindness that make the world a little bit better for one person - it's time to bake cookies, smile at strangers and it's time to write a letter. Writing a letter is the choice to focus on communicating with another person for a neat, tidy 30 minutes or so.
I'm overstating it a bit, I know. I'm not really a paragon of Polly-Anna-ish virtue. I don't really write letters as a Good Deed, most of the time. I do it because I like to. But it is a nice thing to do. And I do think the world needs more letters. So. Without further ado, for those who want to write a letter (or perhaps reply to a letter?) but would like a helping hand, here is Charlotte's Completely Unofficial How to Write a Letter (after all, the best way to encourage people to write letters to you is to write a couple yourself. And who wouldn't like a pleasant surprise in among the bills and Walmart flyers?)
1. Before beginning this process you will need to assemble the following: pen (oh, alright, or pencil. But I don't like pencil. It's smudgy.), paper (fanciness of this is up to you. I'm a dangerous woman in a stationery store, myself, but I've also written on loose leaf.), envelope, address of the recipient, and stamp. Optional supplies are almost endless but may include: glue, colourful markers, old magazines, dried flowers, glitter, lip-stick for your hot love letters, I don't know what else I can come up with...
2. Sit down. Take a deep breath. Pull the paper towards you. Write the date in the top right corner. Write Dear Whoever on the left next line down. Go down another line. Write something other than "How are you?"
3. Are you stuck already? It's not that hard, I promise.Just push that "How are you?" out of your brain. It'll make your whole letter stilted, really it will. Try telling the other person about the place you're writing from. Presumably it's different from where they are. Try telling them about a moment recently that made you think of them. You have been thinking of them, right? You're writing this letter to them aren't you? Try telling them something funny or awkward or interesting that happened to you recently. Your life isn't that boring. I have a boring life and I always have something awkward or funny or interesting to write about.
4. So. You've made it past the first sentence. I congratulate you. Now. The rest of the letter. It's easiest if you come up with a bunch of main themes to ramble around. It's sort of like writing the Dread Essay but without having to keep that formal tone and worry about how to avoid first person. In my experience there are two main types of letter (in the letters to friends category, that is. I'm not taking responsibility for your love letters. You've got to figure that out yourself): the News letter and the...hmmm...we'll call it the Rambling letter.
The News Letter is for you if you have an interesting life or at least a life that has changed in important ways since you last talked to the person you're writing to. (See, look at that preposition ending a sentence. That's how casual this letter writing gig is.) You basically just tell them about all the fun times you had moving to Paris, boating up the Amazon, getting married, moving to Alabama, working as an intern for that big magazine. Whatever it is that you interesting people do.
For the rest of us, there's the Rambling Letter. Sample group of ideas to explore: I had a really good salad yesterday, I love tomatoes, my grandma used to have this awesome vegetable garden (memories, blahblahblah), I think that's why I love to garden, thoughts about loving gardens, wouldn't it be nice to go on a gardens of the world tour - we could start at Versailles move on to tulips in Holland...blahblahblah dreams about travelling... Wishing you all the joy of a good salad. Love, Charlotte.
See, you've probably filled a good two pages by now, easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. And all you'd done recently was stuff your face with tasty tomato salad.
5. The other key to a good letter is questions. Not too many. Just enough to rid of you of the sense that you're madly monologging about tomatoes. This is easy in the News version because you can simply ask what the other person has been up to lately. In the Rambling letter, using the tomato salad example, you could ask the other person whether they did anything interesting with their grandparents (ok, potentially a dangerous topic if they've died recently but hopefully you know your friends well enough for this), what memories they have tied to food, what their dream trip would be...
The other note to make about questions is that if you reply to a letter, I don't think you necessarily need to reply to all the questions the other person asked you. They probably don't remember and it tends to lead to stiltedness - they're not interviewing you, it's not that high pressure. In fact, possibly you should read the letter, absorb the general sense of it and then put it aside while you write a reply. That way, you can respond to what was important (because that's what you'll remember) and then add a bit of interest of your own
without the crutch of just following along in the order of the other person's letter. Just a thought.
6. If you're the doodling type, doodle a bit in the margins. I don't why this makes letters better but it does.
7. Sign your name with a flourish.
8. Fold it up nice and neat and put it in your envelope. Carefully write out their address. Stick the stamp on.
9. Now it's time for the glitter if you're so inclined. Decorate the envelope as much or as little as you like. I'm personally fond of obsessive compulsive type repeating patterns in coloured pen or miniature collages.
10. Find a post box. Slip it in with some good wishes and consider a good deed to be done.
11. Wait for a response. It may or may not come. Don't let that discourage you. Just send more letters.
And there you have it. From someone who's been writing letters since her letters had a crayon picture on the front and three sentences written in gel pen on the back.
Happy Writing ( and Happy New Year),
Charlotte
Sunday 30 December 2012
Monday 6 August 2012
Quarantine!
| Noun: |
|
It's true: I can be a bit of a hypochondriac. I'm not a germophobe - when picking up that ancient jellybean from under my dresser, I have no qualms about sticking it in my mouth and eating it. "I've got a young, strong immune system. I'll be fine," I tell myself confidently as my teeth work through the hardened sugar. As soon as I get a nose bleed though, or a headache, or a momentary pain in my lower back, my faith in my body's defenses flies out the window: Leukemia! Brain aneurysm! Kidney stones! I'm dying! It's one of the many reasons I will never be a medical doctor. (Others include perpetually shaky hands, squeamishness, a fondness for regular sleep and a terrible bedside manner.)
Obviously hypochondria can be an actual psychological problem. And obviously it can be a very annoying tendency. But it's also kind of funny. Sure, when you're freaking out at 3 in the morning that the weird twinge in your back is actually spinal cancer, it doesn't seem that funny. But I tend to lack a sense of humour when suffering insomnia (worst discovery of all time: there is a - really ridiculously rare - genetic disorder that causes people to actually die of being unable to sleep. How am I supposed to get to sleep knowing that? ). With a little bit of sleep though...it's funny in the way all our little neuroses are funny if we look at them objectively.
My illness fears were a lot stronger when I was little. I blame it on being an early and precocious reader. A children's history of Toronto that I read in Grade 2 or 3 may have sparked a long-lasting love of history but it also sparked an almost equally long-lasting horror of polio. There was something terribly vivid about the description of the experience of being stuck in an iron lung that caught my paranoid imagination. I started to read the newspaper at about the same age and quickly discovered a whole new host of ailments in the Health section. I was also fond of stories about pioneer girls in which there was always someone dying of typhoid or cholera or blood poisoning. Then I found out about Black Plague.
"It doesn't exist anymore, Charlotte. That was hundreds of years ago."
"But sometimes monkeys still get it. And this one woman in the US got it and died."
I was kind of a strange kid. Clearly, it wasn't just the reading - I was also naturally anxious and simultaneously completely horrified and a little bit fascinated by death. I refused to go past the wolf enclosure at the zoo after I heard my parents saying that one of the wolves had died. I also read obituaries (ok, I read everything. I even read the sports section when I was little.)
While diseases like polio, cholera and the Black Death were pretty remote from my modern life, the media provided several front page stories tailor-made to freak out the young and paranoid. There was West Nile Virus. There was Mad Cow Disease (alright, fine, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy) - particularly horrifying to me because of emotional news reports about people who couldn't remember their families. I lived in Toronto when the whole city was panicking about SARS. My Girl Guide camp was cancelled because our leaders were nurses and had to work crazy overtime hours.
At some point between the end-ish of elementary and the beginning-ish of junior high, I mostly got over my biggest fears of illness. Maybe I just learned to take myself less seriously. Maybe I got busy enough that I didn't have to analyze every little ache and pain. I still anxiously check my moles to make sure I'm not getting skin cancer. I still feel a spark of panic when my joints feel odd, when I find a weird splotch on my neck. But it's funny now. Sort of. And I like to think there are certain fringe benefits to paranoia. I may have higher blood pressure from anxiety, but I'm unlikely to let undiagnosed symptoms develop into something terrible. I'm unlikely to let myself get obese or go to the tanning salon or take up smoking. Plus, the stories of weird little fears can be exploited to produce new blog material.
Wednesday 1 August 2012
A Different Lens on Life?
I know it's supposed to be a good thing to put yourself in someone else's shoes. As in, have some empathy and try to see the world through another person's point of view. But what about putting yourself in your shoes' shoes? Is my tendency to imagine what it would be like to be an inanimate object a sign of insanity? Consumer culture run horribly amok? Or just a very strange kind of empathy?
I read a book when I was little about the life of a doll and all the different girls who played with her over time. (Can google help me once again? Victory! It's called Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. In case you were wondering.) Alright, a doll at least looks like a person. But I like to think about what it would be like to be a phone and listen to everyone's conversations. Or a house and watch people's lives. Or a pair of shoes, feeling all kinds of different ground, new types of dirt and gravel. Would a person's feet feel like completeness or oppression?
Like a lot of people, my most emotional relationships with inanimate objects are with clothes. Wow. That sounded very weird. I don't talk to my clothes. Not anywhere near as much as I yell at my computer. Although sometimes I dance with them while I'm putting laundry away. But I digress. Actually, I think this is mostly a girl thing (although what do I know? I've never been a guy. Possibly there are hoards of men who know the grief I felt when my pink flare pants went to the secondhand store when I outgrew them in Grade 2). Clothes are some kind of weird embodiment of us. If you (like me) live in a climate with a 6 month winter you can recognize your friends 100 meters away by their winter coats. You think carefully about what to wear to a job interview or a first date because your clothes are supposed to say something about who you are. A piece of clothing can embody a phase of your life (school uniform, all black wardrobe, prom dress). I can think of several scenes in books where women stand in front of their closets pondering their clothing as a reflection of an ended relationship. Clothing sits next to your skin. It absorbs your sweat and your soup spills, blots your tears, and cleans your glasses lenses.
Which brings me to what I actually meant to write about (believe it or not, I didn't really intend to wax poetical about the power of clothing). Glasses. Of all the inanimate objects I imagine the lives of, glasses are my favourite. I was thinking about this because as I was unpacking moving boxes last week, I came across the glasses cases that hold all my old pairs of glasses. I am easily sidetracked. I tried on all the old pairs of glasses: the red wire-framed children's glasses from when I first became bespectacled in Grade 6, the black pair with tiny rhinestones half fallen out, the swirl armed burgundy pair that encircled my eyes up until a year ago.
It looks very strange to see yourself in the mirror in your old glasses. It's like temporarily reverting to whatever age you were when you wore those frames. And then you wonder (if you're me) whether you're seeing the world the way you did when you wore those frames. Just through the power of having put them back on. The reason I'm fascinated by imagining the life of my glasses is that my lenses have seen almost everything that I've seen. Those are the glasses that looked at my first time table in junior high. Those are the glasses that first saw the my high school locker. Those are the glasses that read my high school diploma exams. My sister pointed out that my lenses have steadily got larger - I'd like to see that as a metaphor for a broadening outlook on the world. All of this is, of course, ridiculously whimsical and silly. The size of your glasses means nothing. But physical switches between pairs of glasses as the years run by is a nice metaphor for me about the ever-changing lens through which I see the world. (That's one thing you can say for putting your head inside the heads of objects without heads. It gives you piles of metaphors.)
Wondering whether my flip-flops are smiling at me or grimacing,
Charlotte
I read a book when I was little about the life of a doll and all the different girls who played with her over time. (Can google help me once again? Victory! It's called Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. In case you were wondering.) Alright, a doll at least looks like a person. But I like to think about what it would be like to be a phone and listen to everyone's conversations. Or a house and watch people's lives. Or a pair of shoes, feeling all kinds of different ground, new types of dirt and gravel. Would a person's feet feel like completeness or oppression?
Like a lot of people, my most emotional relationships with inanimate objects are with clothes. Wow. That sounded very weird. I don't talk to my clothes. Not anywhere near as much as I yell at my computer. Although sometimes I dance with them while I'm putting laundry away. But I digress. Actually, I think this is mostly a girl thing (although what do I know? I've never been a guy. Possibly there are hoards of men who know the grief I felt when my pink flare pants went to the secondhand store when I outgrew them in Grade 2). Clothes are some kind of weird embodiment of us. If you (like me) live in a climate with a 6 month winter you can recognize your friends 100 meters away by their winter coats. You think carefully about what to wear to a job interview or a first date because your clothes are supposed to say something about who you are. A piece of clothing can embody a phase of your life (school uniform, all black wardrobe, prom dress). I can think of several scenes in books where women stand in front of their closets pondering their clothing as a reflection of an ended relationship. Clothing sits next to your skin. It absorbs your sweat and your soup spills, blots your tears, and cleans your glasses lenses.
Which brings me to what I actually meant to write about (believe it or not, I didn't really intend to wax poetical about the power of clothing). Glasses. Of all the inanimate objects I imagine the lives of, glasses are my favourite. I was thinking about this because as I was unpacking moving boxes last week, I came across the glasses cases that hold all my old pairs of glasses. I am easily sidetracked. I tried on all the old pairs of glasses: the red wire-framed children's glasses from when I first became bespectacled in Grade 6, the black pair with tiny rhinestones half fallen out, the swirl armed burgundy pair that encircled my eyes up until a year ago.
It looks very strange to see yourself in the mirror in your old glasses. It's like temporarily reverting to whatever age you were when you wore those frames. And then you wonder (if you're me) whether you're seeing the world the way you did when you wore those frames. Just through the power of having put them back on. The reason I'm fascinated by imagining the life of my glasses is that my lenses have seen almost everything that I've seen. Those are the glasses that looked at my first time table in junior high. Those are the glasses that first saw the my high school locker. Those are the glasses that read my high school diploma exams. My sister pointed out that my lenses have steadily got larger - I'd like to see that as a metaphor for a broadening outlook on the world. All of this is, of course, ridiculously whimsical and silly. The size of your glasses means nothing. But physical switches between pairs of glasses as the years run by is a nice metaphor for me about the ever-changing lens through which I see the world. (That's one thing you can say for putting your head inside the heads of objects without heads. It gives you piles of metaphors.)
Wondering whether my flip-flops are smiling at me or grimacing,
Charlotte
Thursday 26 July 2012
The Intimidation Syndrome
I enter the break room, tempted by the promise of my fellow receptionist at the front that there were chocolate bars to be had back here. (that's right folks, this one's gonna be in media res.) Of course, I had hoped they would have been in plain view and I could have subtly snatched one and made my sneaky escape. However, I am greeted by an empty counter top and one veterinarian standing idly waiting for her lunch to finish microwaving. My gut instinct is to turn around and retreat, but this would have been extremely odd and over dramatic given the circumstances. I boldly step forth, trying to remain casual.
Me: So, I hear there's a chocolate bar bonanza going on back here?
small pause
Me: I want in.
Vet: Oh yeah, I think they're in the bottom drawer there.
Me: This one?
Vet: No -
Me: Oh, this one. (grabs a chocolate bar) Aw yea...
exits room
Wow, I actually think that reading that is more painful than having been a part of it. Clearly, the awkward was a-rampaging in this sad happenstance. Why? Why did it have to be this way?
Because of the intimidation factor.
The intimidation factor can make people do one of two things: act overly-formal or act overly-casual. In this case I wanted so desperately to make the vet believe I was like whatever, she doesn't scare me, that I acted abnormal because of my strained casualness. Such is the woe of overthinking and trying to impress people. For some reason acting naturally completely evades you sometimes when it comes to dealing with people who are intimidating - I'm sure everyone can think of a time they said or did something totally stupid because of who they were talking to. Your brain just trips yourself up and once you've said something weird enough or done an awkward enough gesture, there's just no saving it. It's the time you clapped your friend's dad on the shoulder, immediately knew you stepped over the line, and could do nothing to make amends. It's just over.
If I can give you all any advice from my experiences, it's this: ALWAYS go for over-formal. You can do no wrong this way. The worst that can happen is that easygoing people will make fun of you, but at least that breaks the ice and then you can ease out of your overdone politeness. With over-casual, there is no win. The chances that people are going to be easygoing enough to accept that you are for some reason acting like their best friend are very slim. And if you go for over-formal, you are guaranteed to never experience the terrible moment where you jokingly say "shut up" to your friend's mom and forever feel regret and shame. (Yes, it happened to me.)
Me: So, I hear there's a chocolate bar bonanza going on back here?
small pause
Me: I want in.
Vet: Oh yeah, I think they're in the bottom drawer there.
Me: This one?
Vet: No -
Me: Oh, this one. (grabs a chocolate bar) Aw yea...
exits room
Wow, I actually think that reading that is more painful than having been a part of it. Clearly, the awkward was a-rampaging in this sad happenstance. Why? Why did it have to be this way?
Because of the intimidation factor.
The intimidation factor can make people do one of two things: act overly-formal or act overly-casual. In this case I wanted so desperately to make the vet believe I was like whatever, she doesn't scare me, that I acted abnormal because of my strained casualness. Such is the woe of overthinking and trying to impress people. For some reason acting naturally completely evades you sometimes when it comes to dealing with people who are intimidating - I'm sure everyone can think of a time they said or did something totally stupid because of who they were talking to. Your brain just trips yourself up and once you've said something weird enough or done an awkward enough gesture, there's just no saving it. It's the time you clapped your friend's dad on the shoulder, immediately knew you stepped over the line, and could do nothing to make amends. It's just over.
If I can give you all any advice from my experiences, it's this: ALWAYS go for over-formal. You can do no wrong this way. The worst that can happen is that easygoing people will make fun of you, but at least that breaks the ice and then you can ease out of your overdone politeness. With over-casual, there is no win. The chances that people are going to be easygoing enough to accept that you are for some reason acting like their best friend are very slim. And if you go for over-formal, you are guaranteed to never experience the terrible moment where you jokingly say "shut up" to your friend's mom and forever feel regret and shame. (Yes, it happened to me.)
Hoping there was more smile than grimace in this post,
Sarah
Tuesday 24 July 2012
Notes
Today, let us consider the mysterious power of notes. Notes, a seemingly innocuous topic, and also a seemingly boring topic until you think about some of the strange, even unintentionally hilarious, notes you've read in your lifetime. Yes, think of that random scribbled note your mom left behind for you to read when you got home that made little to no sense, think of those unexpected notes in unexpected locations, like that time your brother left that giant note on the washing machine door, or think of that utterly confusing note that someone with very little English skills left on your windshield in a McDonald's parking lot. (Yes, these are all things that have happened to me. But I'm sure you too have had these disconcerting experiences.)
Particularly disconcerting was a note I read recently, left behind by a girl I judged to be totally normal whose dog I am currently petsitting. I arrived at her house for the first day of the job and was greeted by this gem, scribbled in faded sharpie:
_______
...
I repeat.
...
WHAT THE HECK?!
There are so many things wrong with this note.
One, the fact that it was even left! I met this person before starting pet sitting, and she failed to mention her potentially extremely aggressive ex at this time?! Muh... bluh... wuh! There are no words.
Two, she felt the need to include the number I ought to call? The first problem I had was an insult to my safety, but this is just an insult to my intelligence. I mean, I guess what's more concerning is that there must be people out there who wouldn't think to dial 911, and when the murderous ex came to the door they would just pull out their cellphone and think oh my god what's the number for the cops?! Who tells me to call the cops and doesn't, like, leave their number???
Three, clearly this was a complete afterthought. Like, scribbled in a barely-working sharpie on a scrap of used paper? Seriously, she must have been leaving out the door and been like whoa wait, maybe I should warn her about how a guy might come by and try to attack the house. Hmmm...should I? ...yeah, I guess so.
So seriously, I think this note fulfills both the descriptors of "mysterious" and "powerful." The leaver of the note can take absolutely no responsibility, and leave as much of a burden as they want! Not only that, but we are left to imagine... what the hell would Gino try to do? I don't even want to know.
Another note I feel the need to share with you all due to its hilarity is the aforementioned windshield note left at a McDonald's. I will unashamedly tell you I was parked extremely poorly in this particular parking lot, and so I would not have been at all surprised if the note said something like "Don't park so crappily, please, for all of us." But it was instead something much more cryptic.
_______
This note mostly just seems creepy. We really have no way of knowing whether this note is passive-aggressively angry, or if they have some kind of fetish for narrow parking. If it had just cut off at "Please don't park so close next time" I would have understood completely what it meant. However, we have the strangely tagged on portion that is highly questionable. One can't help but wonder, after they process the smiley face... did he mean "gets me excited"? o_O
In the end, I decided that this was probably just left by a well-meaning kindly Russian immigrant who meant to try to both be friendly and reprimanding. Or at least I hope that was the case.
So next time you leave a note in a hurry, remember: someone is either laughing at it later, or wondering whether you are a total creeper.
Particularly disconcerting was a note I read recently, left behind by a girl I judged to be totally normal whose dog I am currently petsitting. I arrived at her house for the first day of the job and was greeted by this gem, scribbled in faded sharpie:
_______
"If my ex-boyfriend Gino comes to the door while you're here just call the cops. This is your only option.[insert long wiggly line]
911"_______
...
I repeat.
...
WHAT THE HECK?!
There are so many things wrong with this note.
One, the fact that it was even left! I met this person before starting pet sitting, and she failed to mention her potentially extremely aggressive ex at this time?! Muh... bluh... wuh! There are no words.
Two, she felt the need to include the number I ought to call? The first problem I had was an insult to my safety, but this is just an insult to my intelligence. I mean, I guess what's more concerning is that there must be people out there who wouldn't think to dial 911, and when the murderous ex came to the door they would just pull out their cellphone and think oh my god what's the number for the cops?! Who tells me to call the cops and doesn't, like, leave their number???
Three, clearly this was a complete afterthought. Like, scribbled in a barely-working sharpie on a scrap of used paper? Seriously, she must have been leaving out the door and been like whoa wait, maybe I should warn her about how a guy might come by and try to attack the house. Hmmm...should I? ...yeah, I guess so.
So seriously, I think this note fulfills both the descriptors of "mysterious" and "powerful." The leaver of the note can take absolutely no responsibility, and leave as much of a burden as they want! Not only that, but we are left to imagine... what the hell would Gino try to do? I don't even want to know.
Another note I feel the need to share with you all due to its hilarity is the aforementioned windshield note left at a McDonald's. I will unashamedly tell you I was parked extremely poorly in this particular parking lot, and so I would not have been at all surprised if the note said something like "Don't park so crappily, please, for all of us." But it was instead something much more cryptic.
_______
"Please don't park so close next time, so its gets me exited :)"_______
This note mostly just seems creepy. We really have no way of knowing whether this note is passive-aggressively angry, or if they have some kind of fetish for narrow parking. If it had just cut off at "Please don't park so close next time" I would have understood completely what it meant. However, we have the strangely tagged on portion that is highly questionable. One can't help but wonder, after they process the smiley face... did he mean "gets me excited"? o_O
In the end, I decided that this was probably just left by a well-meaning kindly Russian immigrant who meant to try to both be friendly and reprimanding. Or at least I hope that was the case.
So next time you leave a note in a hurry, remember: someone is either laughing at it later, or wondering whether you are a total creeper.
Hoping you're not a creeper,
Sarah
Tuesday 17 July 2012
The Hypothetical Dinner Party
If you enjoy reading waste-of-time interviews* as much as I do, you'll be familiar with the question: If you were to have dinner with 10 people, living or dead, who would they be? It's also the sort of thing that turns up in Table Topics.
* Waste-of-time interviews include mid-campaign questionnaires filled out by politicians who would prefer that you focus on their zany high school exploits or personal work-out schedules rather than anything as alienating as actual policy, those "A Talk With the Author" sections in the book club guides at the back of paperbacks, and "5 Minutes With..." features that magazines like to put on the last page to make you happy before you flip the cover closed to be confronted with the scary brooding man in the inevitable perfume ad. I love waste-of-time interviews (also Table Topics).
This question, despite being asked with a frequency that renders it quite banal, provokes in me, anyway, a whole host of other questions. Like: what would we eat? Am I allowed to tell the dead people about the future? Come to think of it, do the dead people show up as zombies? If not, what stage of their life do they show up at? Is this a time travel thing? Can I invite, let's say, young Einstein and old Einstein? What if I invite Adam Smith and Karl Marx and they don't get along? Am I allowed to deliberately provoke controversy by inviting people with differing ideologies? If I invite Gandhi, am I obliged to serve a vegetarian meal? And what would I wear?
Maybe not such a banal question after all. But I think it could be better. I have some propositions for rules and improvements:
(For those of you whose hypothetical dinner party guest lists differ from mine, I've include links to Wikipedia and iMDB to things that seemed like they might cause confusion.)
1. Allow me to invite fictional characters too. Come on. You already allowed me to invite dead people. Why not fictional? The line's not that sharp anyway. People who lived as long ago as Charlemagne almost might as well be fictional for how much anyone knows about them as people. And what if I say I want to invite Homer? Are you going to assemble a bunch of classicists to argue for days about whether one person wrote all the works attributed to Homer? The soufflé will collapse and get cold.
2.Now that I've massively expanded the potential pool for guests by opening up all of fiction, I would like to make a few restrictions too. I know, I know I said anyone living, dead or fictional, but without restrictions there's less creativity. So. May I propose that we not invite
a) Any fictional characters who are not at least vaguely humanoid. It seems discriminatory I know, but just think how awkward Aslan or Charlotte would feel sitting at a dinner party. Have you ever tried eating coq-au-vin without opposable thumbs?
b) No more than one of the usual suspects (Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr...). Seriously, everyone invites them and no-one invites Emma Goldman or Murasaki Shikibu anywhere. It's just not fair. And maybe this way you'll be able to sidestep the whole vegetarian issue.
c) No more than one current celebrity. You have all of history and fiction to choose from. You don't need the entire cast of Valentine's Day.
d) No more than one dead relative. Not to be insensitive, but more than one just gets boring.
e) God, whatever your conception of God is. Think about it. God can never really be your guest anywhere. You welcome Him (choice of the masculine pronoun is for my own convenience, ok?) into your home. He created it. You serve Him food that you've cooked. He created it. You offer Him an after-dinner cigar. He created it. The whole thing is just socially awkward.
3. To make up for the cruel imposition of restrictions on the guest list, I propose to allow one hypothetical dinner party a month. Because it's just too hard to pick only ten people. See? It's going to be OK. You can invite both Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron. Just not to the same dinner party. More interestingly, you can throw theme hypothetical dinner parties. You can invite Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett and eight fictional representations of the Virgin Queen for an evening of discussion about being at the top of Elizabethan England. You can have H.G. Wells, Henry and Clare (in all their "we're the world's most pretentious couple" glory), Douglas Adams, Stephen Hawking and the Doctor get together to talk about the scientific, emotional and grammatical difficulties of time travel. Wow. I should go into dinner party fan fiction. A whole new frontier. Anyway, moving on.
4. You're allowed to bring a friend as a bonus eleventh dinner guest. To even out the numbers and because shared experiences build friendships. Yay.
5. Don't let the cyborgs drink cocktails. It'll all end in tears, mark my words.
Smiling to herself very broadly indeed,
Charlotte
* Waste-of-time interviews include mid-campaign questionnaires filled out by politicians who would prefer that you focus on their zany high school exploits or personal work-out schedules rather than anything as alienating as actual policy, those "A Talk With the Author" sections in the book club guides at the back of paperbacks, and "5 Minutes With..." features that magazines like to put on the last page to make you happy before you flip the cover closed to be confronted with the scary brooding man in the inevitable perfume ad. I love waste-of-time interviews (also Table Topics).
This question, despite being asked with a frequency that renders it quite banal, provokes in me, anyway, a whole host of other questions. Like: what would we eat? Am I allowed to tell the dead people about the future? Come to think of it, do the dead people show up as zombies? If not, what stage of their life do they show up at? Is this a time travel thing? Can I invite, let's say, young Einstein and old Einstein? What if I invite Adam Smith and Karl Marx and they don't get along? Am I allowed to deliberately provoke controversy by inviting people with differing ideologies? If I invite Gandhi, am I obliged to serve a vegetarian meal? And what would I wear?
Maybe not such a banal question after all. But I think it could be better. I have some propositions for rules and improvements:
(For those of you whose hypothetical dinner party guest lists differ from mine, I've include links to Wikipedia and iMDB to things that seemed like they might cause confusion.)
1. Allow me to invite fictional characters too. Come on. You already allowed me to invite dead people. Why not fictional? The line's not that sharp anyway. People who lived as long ago as Charlemagne almost might as well be fictional for how much anyone knows about them as people. And what if I say I want to invite Homer? Are you going to assemble a bunch of classicists to argue for days about whether one person wrote all the works attributed to Homer? The soufflé will collapse and get cold.
2.Now that I've massively expanded the potential pool for guests by opening up all of fiction, I would like to make a few restrictions too. I know, I know I said anyone living, dead or fictional, but without restrictions there's less creativity. So. May I propose that we not invite
a) Any fictional characters who are not at least vaguely humanoid. It seems discriminatory I know, but just think how awkward Aslan or Charlotte would feel sitting at a dinner party. Have you ever tried eating coq-au-vin without opposable thumbs?
b) No more than one of the usual suspects (Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr...). Seriously, everyone invites them and no-one invites Emma Goldman or Murasaki Shikibu anywhere. It's just not fair. And maybe this way you'll be able to sidestep the whole vegetarian issue.
c) No more than one current celebrity. You have all of history and fiction to choose from. You don't need the entire cast of Valentine's Day.
d) No more than one dead relative. Not to be insensitive, but more than one just gets boring.
e) God, whatever your conception of God is. Think about it. God can never really be your guest anywhere. You welcome Him (choice of the masculine pronoun is for my own convenience, ok?) into your home. He created it. You serve Him food that you've cooked. He created it. You offer Him an after-dinner cigar. He created it. The whole thing is just socially awkward.
3. To make up for the cruel imposition of restrictions on the guest list, I propose to allow one hypothetical dinner party a month. Because it's just too hard to pick only ten people. See? It's going to be OK. You can invite both Taylor Lautner and Zac Efron. Just not to the same dinner party. More interestingly, you can throw theme hypothetical dinner parties. You can invite Elizabeth I, Cate Blanchett and eight fictional representations of the Virgin Queen for an evening of discussion about being at the top of Elizabethan England. You can have H.G. Wells, Henry and Clare (in all their "we're the world's most pretentious couple" glory), Douglas Adams, Stephen Hawking and the Doctor get together to talk about the scientific, emotional and grammatical difficulties of time travel. Wow. I should go into dinner party fan fiction. A whole new frontier. Anyway, moving on.
4. You're allowed to bring a friend as a bonus eleventh dinner guest. To even out the numbers and because shared experiences build friendships. Yay.
5. Don't let the cyborgs drink cocktails. It'll all end in tears, mark my words.
Smiling to herself very broadly indeed,
Charlotte
Friday 13 July 2012
Corgis
It is now time for me to share with you the most wonderful dog on the planet. The corgi. One day I will own one of these, or possibly own thousands of them. Whatever my career allows me to do. In any case, I consider myself a true Corgi Connoisseur (copyright for this title goes to none other than Charlotte). To truly appreciate the greatness of the corgi, we must go over the four crucial aspects that make them so ridiculously awesome: Body to Leg Ratio, Versatility, Ambition and Adorable Lack of Intelligence.
1. Body to Leg Ratio
The corgi body to leg ratio is one of the critical components of the corgi repertoire that makes them the most desirable canine known to man. This holy ratio demands that body length is 4 times that of the leg height.
This creates a compact squishiness that is quite adorable, as the corgi has a predisposition to waddle rather than walk simply due to its body type. This body ratio is not to be equated to the dachshund body ratio, which is excessive and therefore no longer adorable, as it only evokes pity from us corgi connoisseurs. That poor dachshund and its unrighteous 1:6 ratio, causing it all sorts of horrible back problems. No, the 1:4 ratio is the only truly delightful waddle-inducing ratio.
The 1:4 ratio also has the wonderful side effect of producing moments like the famed Corgi Flop, in which Cooper the corgi shows us the joy of having tiny legs.
2. Versatility
The corgi has a great deal of diversity not only in its abilities, but also in its uses! It goes without saying that the corgi is a great companion, good with kids, yada yada yada, but just look at what it can do! What you can do with it! A dog of this level of well-meaning, innocent attitude and convenient shape gives the opportunity to invest in all kinds of new activities. Including, making a tunnel!
Giving it an iPad!
Or putting it in a hilarious spin off video!
3. Ambition
Not only versatile and chubbcute, the corgi is also a dog of great ambition. They're the queen's favourite, so naturally they are driven to go above and beyond what is required of them. For instance, although we have seen that the corgi is somewhat limited in its jumping abilities (see Cooper), determined corgis are able to overcome this shortcoming and be great athletes, like little Neil Armstrongs.
4. Adorable Lack of Intelligence
As much as I revere the corgi, mayhaps even worship it, I must be humbled and acknowledge that yes, this is a dumb doggie. Although the corgi rises above every other breed in numerous ways, intelligence is not one of these. But, lucky for the corgi, it is cute and waddly and so its lack of intelligence only suits it more! Whereas something like a bulldog or pug, well, when they are stupid we are not even surprised. And then they are dumb and a little ugly too, and it is hard to see what is redeeming.
Anyhoo, as previously mentioned, in corgis this lack of intelligence is a redeeming characteristic! One cannot help but think, aww, corgi is so silly! Case and point, this little fellow:
Other Great Corgi Qualities
- Fun to Name: Consider. Oswald, Lu Lu Belle, Edgar, Lucy. So many good corgi names.
- Cute Puppies. Consider this video:
And if all this has not been enough to make you love the greatest dog in the world, at least you can be well-educated on what a corgi is!
-Sarah
Recreational Lies
I have a confession to make: I have a habit of lying. Don't worry, I rarely lie to people I see on a regular basis (although, I admit now, I did take that last cookie).
Far too much work and perfectly illustrates the wonderfully sanctimonious "What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive" (say it all together now, in a reproving sing-song).
No, no. I have a habit of lying to strangers.
I don't really imagine this is an uncommon habit. Who wants to explain everything to the grocery clerk, the guy next to you on the airplane or the overfriendly bus driver? I think of it as my revenge for being forced into semi-awkward conversation. Although, come to think of it, lying a little bit sometimes makes the conversation more awkward. For example:
Charlotte is walking absent-mindedly through the bakery section of the grocery store to buy dinner rolls. (This is the stuff of great drama, dear audience).
While awkwardly maneuvering the tongs to place rolls in the weirdly thick plastic bag, the obviously bored guy behind the counter decides to start a conversation.
Bakery Guy: So, done work for the day?
Have so far spent summer not being hired.
Charlotte: Nope, didn't work today.
Look at that, technically not even a lie.
BG: Got the day off, huh?
Dammit.
C: Yep.
BG: Back to work tomorrow?
Must finish with awkward tongs and make my escape.
C: Haha, actually not until Monday...
This encounter, dull and awkward as it is, pretty much illustrates one of the main reasons for lying to strangers - irrational fear of judgement. Does anyone care if I have a summer job? No. Do I care if random grocery workers know that I don't have a summer job? Apparently, yes.
The other reason is laziness. Let's say I'm virtuously off to play scrabble with my grandmother's cousin's wife because we get along well and she needs the company. When the bus driver asks me where I'm going? "Oh, just going to hang out with friends." Because who wants to explain all that?
Writing this, I realize that lying is actually a weirdly boring topic because the most successful lies are the dullest. I seem to remember a bit in The Golden Compass about good lies not needing imagination...come on, Google Books, help me out with this...aha: "Many good liars have no imagination at all..." Which may or may not be true. But it is true that most of the time a lie's success depends mainly on being so boring that no-one is interested in inquiring further. Maybe that illustrates something about the importance of curiosity (as someone who is incurably nosy, I hope so).
I do know, though, that telling little tiny lies to strangers is not only a method of avoiding explanations and judgement. You know how sometimes you end up walking about 50 meters behind someone going in the same direction as you and they keep giving freaked out looks behind them because it seems like you're a creepy stalker? That always makes me laugh a little insanely to myself. And for some reason telling unplanned, compulsive lies to people I will probably never see again gives me the same feeling of mad hilarity.
Maybe some day I'll take a cruise and adopt a fake life and lie like crazy for 10 days. Just to see if I could get away with it.
I'm probably completely insane. But I promise I'm not lying.
Hm. Not actually the last cookie...
Far too much work and perfectly illustrates the wonderfully sanctimonious "What a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive" (say it all together now, in a reproving sing-song).
(Nevermind, that's creepy.)
No, no. I have a habit of lying to strangers.
Charlotte is walking absent-mindedly through the bakery section of the grocery store to buy dinner rolls. (This is the stuff of great drama, dear audience).
While awkwardly maneuvering the tongs to place rolls in the weirdly thick plastic bag, the obviously bored guy behind the counter decides to start a conversation.
Bakery Guy: So, done work for the day?
Have so far spent summer not being hired.
Charlotte: Nope, didn't work today.
Look at that, technically not even a lie.
BG: Got the day off, huh?
Dammit.
C: Yep.
BG: Back to work tomorrow?
Must finish with awkward tongs and make my escape.
C: Haha, actually not until Monday...
This encounter, dull and awkward as it is, pretty much illustrates one of the main reasons for lying to strangers - irrational fear of judgement. Does anyone care if I have a summer job? No. Do I care if random grocery workers know that I don't have a summer job? Apparently, yes.
The other reason is laziness. Let's say I'm virtuously off to play scrabble with my grandmother's cousin's wife because we get along well and she needs the company. When the bus driver asks me where I'm going? "Oh, just going to hang out with friends." Because who wants to explain all that?
Writing this, I realize that lying is actually a weirdly boring topic because the most successful lies are the dullest. I seem to remember a bit in The Golden Compass about good lies not needing imagination...come on, Google Books, help me out with this...aha: "Many good liars have no imagination at all..." Which may or may not be true. But it is true that most of the time a lie's success depends mainly on being so boring that no-one is interested in inquiring further. Maybe that illustrates something about the importance of curiosity (as someone who is incurably nosy, I hope so).
I do know, though, that telling little tiny lies to strangers is not only a method of avoiding explanations and judgement. You know how sometimes you end up walking about 50 meters behind someone going in the same direction as you and they keep giving freaked out looks behind them because it seems like you're a creepy stalker? That always makes me laugh a little insanely to myself. And for some reason telling unplanned, compulsive lies to people I will probably never see again gives me the same feeling of mad hilarity.
Maybe some day I'll take a cruise and adopt a fake life and lie like crazy for 10 days. Just to see if I could get away with it.
I'm probably completely insane. But I promise I'm not lying.
Tuesday 10 July 2012
Sarah and Charlotte think about money.
Sarah:
Deniro. Fat cheddah stacks. Loot. Dough. Cash. Money.
We all know what I'm talking about here: the kaching a ling. If you are not yet annoyed by this post and its blatantly attention grabbing intro, be prepared to be annoyed because it is a rant about money. And everyone's heard a money-rant, one way or another - why do we use it if it's just paper? What significance does it even hold for us anymore? Blah blah blah.
In some ways, money could even be viewed as a noble thing. It is a symbolic measure of how much work we have put into our lives, a measure of our merit. In theory, it is probably best left as a symbolic, metaphorical thing. That way it encourages people to do something that will contribute to society as a whole, rather than searching around panning for gold or mining valuable ores. These rarities have intrinsic value, but what does that do for humanity?
On the other hand, there are still thievery and illegal industries to consider. What happens to the merit-based value of money when it is gleaned in such ways? If only there was a way to void a bill when it falls into the wrong hands. Like, if money was just slightly conscious, had just the ability to discern morality...sci-fi bioengineered money. That's what we need.
But seriously. Not only do we have to consider the intentions of the seller in this case (ie. let us consider a drug dealer - clearly not exactly well-intentioned in selling their product) but also the intentions of the buyer (AKA the person pouring money into the drug trade). The buyer may have gotten this money through legitimate means. For drama's sake, let's pretend it's a lawyer with the whole nuclear family deal, but a crack-cocaine addiction on the side. So, by day he defends the law, and by night he breaks it and sullies his well-earned cash. What does money mean anymore in this case?! It is meant to measure the efforts of the lawyer, doing right by humanity, and therefore is symbolic of something good. Yet it immediately becomes symbolic of something bad as soon as the lawyer is given free will to spend it as he wishes.
Of course there are safeguards in place to try to prevent money from becoming tainted in this way, to preserve its goodness, ie. the law making purchase and sale of crack-cocaine illegal. Overall, it seems humankind desires to keep the meritocracy. Charlotte?
Charlotte:
Well, I guess when Sarah said she was writing a rant about money, I expected it to be about the misery of worrying about tuition or something. But apparently we're more philosophical than that. Luckily, I have spent enough time on roadtrips in my life that I have a set of thoughts about almost any topic you care to name (along with a broad knowledge of Shania Twain lyrics). While Sarah is thinking about the difficulties of money as an indicator of moral worth, I've always imagined money as basically representative of food rather than worth.
Think about it. In a world without money, you'd basically have to spend all day looking for food and trying not to get killed (like every other animal on this planet). The only thing that allows people to do other stuff (make cabinets, write pop songs, sell crack cocaine) is a way of trading cabinets, pop songs and cocaine for the food that they actually need to survive. So when I think about buying a house, I envision trading an enormous pile of groceries for the deed to your new abode. Although that kind of thinking can bring a whole new level of confusion to thinking about macroeconomic systems.
I think I'm going to stop there because I know just slightly more than nothing about economics. If I'm going to deal with semi-fictional systems, I pick literature any day. So I leave you there, with the idea that your debit card is symbolically a large piece of mammoth meat.
Sarah:
BUT, I would say that money still measures your moral worth. Are you a good enough person to deserve food, is the question. I think the idea is, if you work hard enough, by our system that means we consider you an asset and therefore we will give you this paper that in turn gets you your food that in turn allows you to continue living. If you don't do enough to impress us or to benefit us, then yeah, you will have to scrounge for your food with whatever meagre money you can come by. (cutthroat world, I know.) It's like, the final frontier of survival of the fittest. By measuring people by their merit we inadvertently select out many people, perhaps not in their ability to reproduce as fitness has previously been measured, but in their possession of a passable standard of living. As Charlotte has said though, we lack the knowledge of economics to make any broad statements about this. Economic depression of many areas makes extending this generality to a global level completely ridiculous. But hey, here in Canada, maybe it's something to think about.
I mean, there are several other amenities equally important to food that we would have to wander around for, too, if we were moneyless like all those primitive other animals. Just think of how poorly equipped humans would be if money were to lose its value all of a sudden. We're these pale, weak things that have no way to keep warm or protected from the elements without money. I suppose if money never came into invention we would be a little tougher, but at this point in time it would just be a mass die-off. Interesting to imagine if we had never gotten so cozy with currency what life would be like now. Probably we would never have traveled very far north and we would still be on the barter system...so maybe not so exciting. Money: a double edged sword.
Deniro. Fat cheddah stacks. Loot. Dough. Cash. Money.
We all know what I'm talking about here: the kaching a ling. If you are not yet annoyed by this post and its blatantly attention grabbing intro, be prepared to be annoyed because it is a rant about money. And everyone's heard a money-rant, one way or another - why do we use it if it's just paper? What significance does it even hold for us anymore? Blah blah blah.
In some ways, money could even be viewed as a noble thing. It is a symbolic measure of how much work we have put into our lives, a measure of our merit. In theory, it is probably best left as a symbolic, metaphorical thing. That way it encourages people to do something that will contribute to society as a whole, rather than searching around panning for gold or mining valuable ores. These rarities have intrinsic value, but what does that do for humanity?
On the other hand, there are still thievery and illegal industries to consider. What happens to the merit-based value of money when it is gleaned in such ways? If only there was a way to void a bill when it falls into the wrong hands. Like, if money was just slightly conscious, had just the ability to discern morality...sci-fi bioengineered money. That's what we need.
But seriously. Not only do we have to consider the intentions of the seller in this case (ie. let us consider a drug dealer - clearly not exactly well-intentioned in selling their product) but also the intentions of the buyer (AKA the person pouring money into the drug trade). The buyer may have gotten this money through legitimate means. For drama's sake, let's pretend it's a lawyer with the whole nuclear family deal, but a crack-cocaine addiction on the side. So, by day he defends the law, and by night he breaks it and sullies his well-earned cash. What does money mean anymore in this case?! It is meant to measure the efforts of the lawyer, doing right by humanity, and therefore is symbolic of something good. Yet it immediately becomes symbolic of something bad as soon as the lawyer is given free will to spend it as he wishes.
Of course there are safeguards in place to try to prevent money from becoming tainted in this way, to preserve its goodness, ie. the law making purchase and sale of crack-cocaine illegal. Overall, it seems humankind desires to keep the meritocracy. Charlotte?
Charlotte:
Well, I guess when Sarah said she was writing a rant about money, I expected it to be about the misery of worrying about tuition or something. But apparently we're more philosophical than that. Luckily, I have spent enough time on roadtrips in my life that I have a set of thoughts about almost any topic you care to name (along with a broad knowledge of Shania Twain lyrics). While Sarah is thinking about the difficulties of money as an indicator of moral worth, I've always imagined money as basically representative of food rather than worth.
Think about it. In a world without money, you'd basically have to spend all day looking for food and trying not to get killed (like every other animal on this planet). The only thing that allows people to do other stuff (make cabinets, write pop songs, sell crack cocaine) is a way of trading cabinets, pop songs and cocaine for the food that they actually need to survive. So when I think about buying a house, I envision trading an enormous pile of groceries for the deed to your new abode. Although that kind of thinking can bring a whole new level of confusion to thinking about macroeconomic systems.
I think I'm going to stop there because I know just slightly more than nothing about economics. If I'm going to deal with semi-fictional systems, I pick literature any day. So I leave you there, with the idea that your debit card is symbolically a large piece of mammoth meat.
Sarah:
BUT, I would say that money still measures your moral worth. Are you a good enough person to deserve food, is the question. I think the idea is, if you work hard enough, by our system that means we consider you an asset and therefore we will give you this paper that in turn gets you your food that in turn allows you to continue living. If you don't do enough to impress us or to benefit us, then yeah, you will have to scrounge for your food with whatever meagre money you can come by. (cutthroat world, I know.) It's like, the final frontier of survival of the fittest. By measuring people by their merit we inadvertently select out many people, perhaps not in their ability to reproduce as fitness has previously been measured, but in their possession of a passable standard of living. As Charlotte has said though, we lack the knowledge of economics to make any broad statements about this. Economic depression of many areas makes extending this generality to a global level completely ridiculous. But hey, here in Canada, maybe it's something to think about.
I mean, there are several other amenities equally important to food that we would have to wander around for, too, if we were moneyless like all those primitive other animals. Just think of how poorly equipped humans would be if money were to lose its value all of a sudden. We're these pale, weak things that have no way to keep warm or protected from the elements without money. I suppose if money never came into invention we would be a little tougher, but at this point in time it would just be a mass die-off. Interesting to imagine if we had never gotten so cozy with currency what life would be like now. Probably we would never have traveled very far north and we would still be on the barter system...so maybe not so exciting. Money: a double edged sword.
Monday 2 July 2012
Songs for the End of the World?
I'm not sure whether it's pessimism, media mutterings about global financial markets and climate change, or too many science fiction novels, but I have a habit of imagining the world post-apocalypse. It's not as morbid as it sounds, I swear. I pretty much imagine Little House on the Prairie - covered wagons and all - except on an unforgiving barren landscape with a backstory of nuclear war, global pandemic, or sudden and disastrous climatic shifts.
See? Perfectly harmless. Nothing can be that bad if there are covered wagons involved.
This habit of imagination leads to trains of thought like Maybe I should judge the validity of professions by how useful they would be in the scenario of a post-apocalyptic world... (Doctors and engineers still manage to come out ahead, of course, but people like midwives and wilderness guides gain a sudden advantage and the CEO loses most of his prestige).
Part of the fun of imagining a post-apocalyptic world is that you can throw out all the normal assumptions of life as it is now (look at that positive spin: See? This world-ending disaster isn't terrible! It's a chance to challenge societal assumptions!) and one of my favourite imaginings is to think of a world without pop culture and art.
I don't really mean without art, but without the internet or iPods or books or newspapers or movies or TV. I'm not saying this in a "Oh, wasn't the world a better place in the good old days back before mass media" kind of way either. It's just that it's weird and kind of cool to think about what would happen without all the mechanisms we have at this moment in history to get information and art and stories. Because people would still need information and art and, most of all, stories in a post-apocalyptic world. They'd just have to produce all that themselves.
It's neat to think about what you'd remember. I like to imagine myself putting my grubby, post-apocalyptic children to bed by telling them garbled remixes of Harry Potter stories (yes, all my children and I survived the giant disaster that wiped out large portions of humanity. It's my imagination).
Sometimes when I'm out walking my dog in the woods I try to sing all the songs I can sing without a recording or lyrics to help me. This is my playlist for a post-apocalyptic world - and dear Lord, it has an awful lot of Disney princess songs on it. It is comforting, though, isn't it, to know that I would remember something. I have a playlist for the end of the world and so do you. It's all the weird bits and pieces and fragments of just stuff that you've accumulated over your life. I'm not really sure what to draw from that thought, except that I find it comforting. I like the idea that all the people sitting in their covered wagons on the great plain of the end of the world are sitting there telling each other stories about Elizabeth Bennet and Pikachu and this one really dramatic episode of America's Next Top Model; they're singing each other to sleep with lullabies they learned from their grandmothers and Lady Gaga songs.
Smiling at that thought and Grimacing at the idea of a global disaster,
Charlotte
See? Perfectly harmless. Nothing can be that bad if there are covered wagons involved.
This habit of imagination leads to trains of thought like Maybe I should judge the validity of professions by how useful they would be in the scenario of a post-apocalyptic world... (Doctors and engineers still manage to come out ahead, of course, but people like midwives and wilderness guides gain a sudden advantage and the CEO loses most of his prestige).
Part of the fun of imagining a post-apocalyptic world is that you can throw out all the normal assumptions of life as it is now (look at that positive spin: See? This world-ending disaster isn't terrible! It's a chance to challenge societal assumptions!) and one of my favourite imaginings is to think of a world without pop culture and art.
I don't really mean without art, but without the internet or iPods or books or newspapers or movies or TV. I'm not saying this in a "Oh, wasn't the world a better place in the good old days back before mass media" kind of way either. It's just that it's weird and kind of cool to think about what would happen without all the mechanisms we have at this moment in history to get information and art and stories. Because people would still need information and art and, most of all, stories in a post-apocalyptic world. They'd just have to produce all that themselves.
It's neat to think about what you'd remember. I like to imagine myself putting my grubby, post-apocalyptic children to bed by telling them garbled remixes of Harry Potter stories (yes, all my children and I survived the giant disaster that wiped out large portions of humanity. It's my imagination).
Sometimes when I'm out walking my dog in the woods I try to sing all the songs I can sing without a recording or lyrics to help me. This is my playlist for a post-apocalyptic world - and dear Lord, it has an awful lot of Disney princess songs on it. It is comforting, though, isn't it, to know that I would remember something. I have a playlist for the end of the world and so do you. It's all the weird bits and pieces and fragments of just stuff that you've accumulated over your life. I'm not really sure what to draw from that thought, except that I find it comforting. I like the idea that all the people sitting in their covered wagons on the great plain of the end of the world are sitting there telling each other stories about Elizabeth Bennet and Pikachu and this one really dramatic episode of America's Next Top Model; they're singing each other to sleep with lullabies they learned from their grandmothers and Lady Gaga songs.
Smiling at that thought and Grimacing at the idea of a global disaster,
Charlotte
Sunday 1 July 2012
Intromuctionsuction
We were going to have a theme for this blog. And we spent several weeks trying to think of one. But then we realized that our imaginations simply can't be constrained by the limits of a real theme and therefore have decided to go with the theme of "funny and awkward things" and also, possibly random ideas that we just feel like writing about. I've actually always sort of wanted a blog but never made one on the grounds that 1) It's narcissistic (spelled it right the first try! Yay!) and 2) I have nothing to say. Basically the real reasons: 1) I chickened out and 2) I chickened out.
So what's the solution to ideas you're too wimpy to put into action on your own? Suggest them to a friend who will force you to go through with them. In a letter, apparently. There's some kind of oxymoron/irony in the fact that I suggested a blog via snail mail. Too lazy to think about whether it's irony or oxymoron.
It hadn't occurred to me yet that "Smile and Grimace" sort of seems like it's describing us as the creators of this blog (although, I can't say that I would have picked Grimace as my facial expression. I would have picked Raised Eyebrow. But that would be a weird blog title. Not very catchy. I've actually thought about what facial expression I'd be before. Another time that I was bored, I got really obsessed with this internet list activity thing that was all fill in the blank "If I were a day of the week I'd be..." "If I were a shoe I'd be...". In my defense, it was late at night. And I love lists.).
Anyway, I don't know that I've really provided any sort of coherent intro to this blog or what it will be about (not that we really know what it will be about) but hopefully it's semi-interesting to read. Long may this blog be updated and a good solid hurrah!
Grimacingly,
Charlotte
So what's the solution to ideas you're too wimpy to put into action on your own? Suggest them to a friend who will force you to go through with them. In a letter, apparently. There's some kind of oxymoron/irony in the fact that I suggested a blog via snail mail. Too lazy to think about whether it's irony or oxymoron.
It hadn't occurred to me yet that "Smile and Grimace" sort of seems like it's describing us as the creators of this blog (although, I can't say that I would have picked Grimace as my facial expression. I would have picked Raised Eyebrow. But that would be a weird blog title. Not very catchy. I've actually thought about what facial expression I'd be before. Another time that I was bored, I got really obsessed with this internet list activity thing that was all fill in the blank "If I were a day of the week I'd be..." "If I were a shoe I'd be...". In my defense, it was late at night. And I love lists.).
Anyway, I don't know that I've really provided any sort of coherent intro to this blog or what it will be about (not that we really know what it will be about) but hopefully it's semi-interesting to read. Long may this blog be updated and a good solid hurrah!
Grimacingly,
Charlotte
Hello World.
Hello out there!
Sooo most blogs have a "welcome to this blog" kind of blurb, so I figure I'd follow convention even though I am well known to be both bold and spicy. Much like your common chorizo.
So here begins the blogging adventures of me, Sarah, and my friend-ish, Charlotte. Although we are dramatically separated by miles and miles of plains, forests, and aw yeah even a mountain chain, we persevere and continue our friendship(ish... more of a friend-dinghy) via the internet! Isn't it glorious and inspiring? It makes you wanna do something meaningful, like watch a sunset off a hilltop while cuddling a recently-adopted kitten, or something like that.
You must be wondering, why is this blog called Smile and Grimace? Are those adorable metaphoric names for Charlotte and I? If they were, she would be Grimace. (weeheehee! You can't hurt me, I'm protected by a MOUNTAIN CHAIN!) Alas, we didn't really think that hard about the title. It is actually because we were forced to be more creative because the name Happy Blog was already taken. What happened to simplicity, folks? (One might rebuttal, what happened to creativity? To which I say.... um... yeah.) But anyways, let's finally get to the meaning of this name: we hope that our meagre number of readers, if only one another, will smile at the funny/happy things we post, and grimace at the terribly awkward stories we relay! What a wonderful contrast. So hey, if anything, if we succeed your mouth with get a good work-out. Which sounds like you're going to be making out for a long time. Which you can also do instead of reading this blog! A world of possibilities.
On that sweeping generalization, I bid you adieu til next time!
Sooo most blogs have a "welcome to this blog" kind of blurb, so I figure I'd follow convention even though I am well known to be both bold and spicy. Much like your common chorizo.
So here begins the blogging adventures of me, Sarah, and my friend-ish, Charlotte. Although we are dramatically separated by miles and miles of plains, forests, and aw yeah even a mountain chain, we persevere and continue our friendship(ish... more of a friend-dinghy) via the internet! Isn't it glorious and inspiring? It makes you wanna do something meaningful, like watch a sunset off a hilltop while cuddling a recently-adopted kitten, or something like that.
You must be wondering, why is this blog called Smile and Grimace? Are those adorable metaphoric names for Charlotte and I? If they were, she would be Grimace. (weeheehee! You can't hurt me, I'm protected by a MOUNTAIN CHAIN!) Alas, we didn't really think that hard about the title. It is actually because we were forced to be more creative because the name Happy Blog was already taken. What happened to simplicity, folks? (One might rebuttal, what happened to creativity? To which I say.... um... yeah.) But anyways, let's finally get to the meaning of this name: we hope that our meagre number of readers, if only one another, will smile at the funny/happy things we post, and grimace at the terribly awkward stories we relay! What a wonderful contrast. So hey, if anything, if we succeed your mouth with get a good work-out. Which sounds like you're going to be making out for a long time. Which you can also do instead of reading this blog! A world of possibilities.
On that sweeping generalization, I bid you adieu til next time!
-Sarah
More disturbingly realistic animal t-shirts here for your amusement. Or if you genuinely wish to purchase one, I guess I can't stop you.
Also, because first posts are always boring to read, here is something real to consider: should disturbingly realistic animal t-shirts exist? I'm not talking about a t-shirt with a couple horses on it, whatever, tacky people can be tacky. I'm talking about a t-shirt that is simply a massive close-up of an animal's face. If I saw someone wearing this in real life, I sincerely believe my immediate reaction would be to recoil in fear because an enormous pig is lumbering towards me.
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