Stupid Dog

While I was taking a shower, my dog knocked over a bottle of Advil. By the time I got out of the shower, she was happily chewing on the plastic bottle, I could only find one complete tablet left, and I had no idea how many tablets were in the bottle to start with.

I took her to the vet right away, and apparently dogs absorb medicine so rapidly that it would have been pointless to pump her stomach or to make her vomit. So he gave me some other pills, and told me to keep her hydrated and bring her back if she starts puking blood.

But she hasn't been puking, or had diarrhea, or anything, and this happened about 3 hours ago. Advil is one of the worst things that doggies can eat, and while she's a decent size dog (about 40 pounds now), eating maybe 10 or 15 tablets is not a good thing.

Stupid dog. I hope she's OK.

Office Politics

If your current boss asks you about a past job, what is the best way to go about it if you have nothing nice to say - but you were asked directly?

Like, Omigod, Shopping

One of my favorite things about Mexico is that the local markets always have a thrift store-ish section...where basically a bunch of clothes are thrown onto folding tables, and you can root around until you find that pair of jeans that would cost at least $60 at home for 100 pesos. (Of course, at home, I would be making $60/hr for private tutoring instead of 100 pesos/hr, but that's another story.)

When I was in high school, my favorite store of all time was The Garment District...in a time before hipsters made mix and match vintage and trendy cool. And when I was little, my grandmother would regularly take me to the thrift stores in her neighboring towns to see what we could find. I've never been, and never will be, adverse to buying something in a sketchy-looking situation as long as I know I'm getting something quality. The idea of something falling off a truck doesn't really bother me either.

I've always been kind of ambivalent about popular brands, and I think that mostly has to do with feeling like I'm being ripped off. I don't, and never have, owned anything from Abercrombie and Fitch, Aeropostale, Hollister, and only here have I bought anything from American Eagle (awesome pants? For cheap? At aforementioned collection of folding tables? Yes.) And it also has to do with not wanting everyone to know where I got my clothing, exactly what other colors it comes in, and how much it cost. Even if a shirt is nice, if I know I am going to pass 5 people wearing the exact same thing, I'm not going to get it.

This is not to say that I have any kind of grudge against mass clothing production or mass marketing or mall stores. It's just not really my thing. And this feeling was honed over the course of a childhood and adolescence growing up in a town where, when a girl bent over, 95% of the time you could be sure of seeing "Victoria's Secret" on her underwear band. Ironically.

I know that these issues of branding, and keeping up with the Joneses, and whatnot, are part of how the US is - needing to have the right clothes and the right look to fit in. And to a certain extent, it's like that everywhere in the world. But I find it refreshing that Lucky Jeans are mixed in with the brand from WalMart at the folding tables, and what matters the most is that you find a pair that fits.

Now, all they need are dressing rooms...

Blech

I am never doing any kind of immigration paperwork ever again. Period.

What Jessica Simpson's Existence Says About A Double Standard (Or Not) For Female Appearance

Because I read about these things (since it's less depressing than the real news, and more digestible in junk food size portions than The Magic Mountain) apparently Jessica Simpson got fat. I never actually watched Newlyweds, but I do know what it was about thanks to the vacuum that is pop culture. Um, and also, its title.

I know that the shtick was that she was ditzy and cute, and he put up with it in a finger-shaking way. I Love Lucy for people who:
A) Can't deal with words with more 3 syllables. (Vitameatavegamin? Huh?)
B) Can't deal with anything in black and white.
C) Forget about something within a few weeks after its lifespan expires.

OK, a half bit reality TV personality got fat by Hollywood standards. No big deal. But then, apparently, there was a backlash because she LOOKED GREAT and MAYBE PUT ON A FEW POUNDS and HOLLYWOOD HAS UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS FOR REAL WOMEN'S BODIES.

I'm gonna call equal measures of duh and bullshit on that.

Part of the business of Hollywood, of MTV, of entertainment in general, is selling a fantasy. And the fantasy of Jessica Simpson includes someone cute, impossibly skinny, and with huge boobs. That's what she's been marketed as since she was just another virginal-not-crazy-Britney wannabe; that's been the image she and her managers have very conscientiously been trying to sell for the past 10 years. Is it unrealistic? Yes, of course. Did she starve herself? Maybe. But it's a living, and a very lucrative one at that.


So, now that she looks a little more normal, no wonder people are calling her out. She is literally not living up to her own her own image, of what the red blooded American woman should look like. And something everyone, red blooded Americans included, loves is schadenfreude when their graven idols fall and chip.


After all this time, she and her handlers should be savvy enough to know when she has to get to the gym, and when she should diet, before being photographed in skintight clothing for a public performance. They should know that Jessica Simpson, as she has been marketed, is not a real woman. She is more like a Barbie doll.


If an issue were made of Meryl Streep, or Aretha Franklin, or Hillary Clinton gaining weight, then there would be a double standard at play. The difference there is that these women have built their careers on their respective talents, intelligences, and bodies of work, rather than on their physical appearances. If their physical appearance were brought into play, it would have little, if anything, to do with the way these women have, in fact, presented themselves to the world.

So, this is why I say that there is not a double standard being applied when Jessica Simpson is called fat. She is failing to live up to her own standard of beauty, which a good chunk of the money earned off of that probably goes right back to maintaining. Since much of this public figure's career is based on appearance and very little on substance, what else is there to go on?

Why Rock of Love Bus is Amazing

As long as I can remember, I have always loved trash TV. When I stayed home sick from school, my big rush was watching Jerry Springer without my mom realizing it (she forbade my watching it...this involved a lot of "channel surfing" when I heard her approach.) Jerry Springer and Maury were my favorites, which made life in the sickbed great because it was 3 full hours of alternating freakshows in the mornings, from 9 until 12.

So, really, it's no surprise that I love the trashy reality TV shows that VH1 purveys. I love them to varying degrees, with Flavor of Love probably the least favorite, but I suppose that that was their trial period. The shows got better, and trashier, as the production team got more experience.

Hence, this, the third season of Rock of Love, is AMAZING. Beyond amazing. Life altering.

Life altering in the sense that you didn't realize people could be just THAT idiotic.

I'm a bit of a sadist. I love watching people make complete idiots of themselves, for the viewing pleasure of whoever stops to rubberneck. With the trashy talk shows, it's a bit different. If you sign up for a show entitled "Are You the Father?: Paternity Tests Revealed" you have a pretty clear idea of what you are getting yourself into. But when a similarly trashy show has a "true love" (albeit with a skankyass washed up hair metal lead singer) theme, the actual participants try and justify their behavior through a kind of moralistic jargon. And you end up wondering if they are just reading cue cards, and actually understand what the words they are saying mean.

The hypocrisy evident in a competition for "true love" that inevitably involves strippers and penalizes those contestants with a disdain for this kind of voyeuristic bullshit is amazing. To be fair, though, being on a show like this is definitely voyeuristic bullshit to start with...maybe the contestants are being penalized for not taking the premise to its logical conclusion.

Regardless.

Rock of Love Bus is amazing. And here are some reasons why.

1) Where, on any dating competition anywhere, has it been so obvious that every single contestant has had a boob job?

2) Every season of Rock of Love, the girls have gotten both dumber and trashier. This time, the bottom of the barrel has been sandblasted.

3) You could write a goddamn masters thesis on how groupies, as illustrated by the Rock of Love girls, have set back feminism by a hundred years. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever, other than being constantly drunk or high, for how these women present themselves, and how Bret Michaels treats them. Fuck Penny Lane.

4) If the women are ridiculous idiots, Bret Michaels looks like he fell off the Botox Bus one too many times.

5) Everyone is a bad actor. No exceptions. On the plus side, seeing everyone lie so obviously makes me smile throughout the episode.

But, beyond the label of awesomely bad, comes a point where the awesome, rather than the bad, becomes the idée fixe. Where else have you seen half naked women playing "ice hockey" with baby dolls with hair extensions as the pucks? What about a kelptomaniac ex-porn star stealing used socks? What about women taking shots from each other's vaginas?

I rest my case.