The Michael Jackson Post

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be understood by another person. When I was younger, the Great Dream was to find someone who understood every part of me, without me having to communicate it (which made me an excellent girlfriend at age 14, I'm quite sure). It took me years to tame the excitement I'd feel when someone would say something that made me feel utterly understood, like finally I'd found a truly kindred spirit. A cute boy would have been ideal, but really, anyone would have been fine. It was a big lure of online relationships at first--I remember reading a post on a bulletin board about how this woman gagged every time she brushed a certain quadrant of her teeth, and how she thought it was linked to some sort of psychological trigger, and I thought, Omigod, someone ELSE thinks that and omigod I've totally found my Other. She wasn't my Other. Nor was the woman who talked about "the sadness you feel in your arms," or any guy I've gone out with, no matter the quality of our 2 a.m. lights-out pillow talk, hands held, bodies swaddled in each other, hearts open. The best I could hope for was those moments in which you hear someone, or they hear you, and you know that the other person, in that moment, in that context, really does understand.

And now, I'm fine with that. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that because no person can ever be truly known by another, "A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his or her solitude." I'm unmarried, but I've found a guardian of my solitude; in my close friends, I've found still more. We get each other, in part because we get that neither of us will be wholly "gotten" by the other--not because of our failings but because of our humanness. The parts of me that my guardians don't get, I look to affirm in, say, literature. Or good movies, or family, either through their "getting" it too or through their intrinsic understanding of my history. Or posts on bulletin boards, or a stranger at a party who says one comment that I haven't heard before except in my own mind. There are plenty of people who echo my inner voice: There are many who are creative but hampered by lack of direction; dilettantes but wanting to be more; natural optimists with depressive tendencies. I've never had to fear being, well, un-understood. And the parts of myself that I haven't heard anyone else "get"? I keep them dear to myself, usually not out of shame--occasionally, sure--but more often because secrets are precious; because the murky, unknowable parts keep us from being a string of personality DNA, jigsaw puzzles of other people.

I can't imagine--really, cannot imagine--what it would be like to be in a world in which the number of people who understand fundamental things about you is infinitesimally small. Because you're famous--wildly famous--because the world watched your self-hatred morph and expand the way I watched my neighbor boy grow up from four-year-old to a young man whose voice changed last summer. Because your predilections are immoral, criminal, yet your status allows you to shield yourself from getting the kind of help you would need to reconcile those desires with your similarly true desires to do the right thing. Because we all know about your family; because your pill problem is on the front page; because you are loved and hated in equal measures; because the mere whisper of your presence brings electricity.

So you meet a certain cache of people who understand what it's like to be wildly famous. You find people who are self-proclaimed freaks, and buy skeletons of the freaks who can't speak with you about what it was like for them. You find children who understand what it's like to lose a childhood; you find children who, you think, can give that back to you. You find beautiful, troubled people, and try to collect them. But even then, you are too big for them.

Michael Jackson was so large that his death prompted not a reaction of sadness but of--not quite humor, but of archness. I wasn't cracking jokes or anything, but his death immediately became a ludicrous event. My best friend was late to meet me for dinner. "Sorry, I got caught up at work," she said. "Don't lie; you were composing yourself after mourning for Michael," I said. And we laughed.

His death came up a few times over dinner. And finally, she casually said what we say of sick old people and dogs: He's out of his misery now. And instead of it sounding like a cliche, something you say to excuse a possibly sad event, it was the absolute truth. I was never a crazed fan; I liked him like we all did, no more. I've talked about the tragedy of Michael Jackson before--how can you not, in order to keep the mix of fame beyond fame and awful acts against children from being just overwhelmingly depressing--but it wasn't until I connected him with Rilke that I saw that perhaps his biggest tragedy was that he was given both too much solitude and never, ever enough. He needed a guardian too.

Give Me Snickers Or Give Me Death

Food manufacturers are, according to the head of the FDA, manipulating foods to make them taste so good that you can't help but want more. Their tactics include: hitting a "bliss point" of fats, salt, and sugar (the FDA head, Dr. David Kessler, cites a Snickers bar and the way it melts in your mouth while still providing crunch); not overdoing any of the pleasure points so as to avoid creating consumer overwhelm; designing foods with layers of taste to engage our brains. Companies "design food for irresistibility... It's been part of their business plans."

To which I say, no shit? As opposed to the food companies that create foods that don't taste good, in order to get you to consume less of them?

Listen, I'm all for companies taking responsibility for agitating addictive behaviors in order to exploit the public. (See also: the tobacco industry.) But there is a huge difference between a company manipulating data about their product (or hiding said data, or creating marketing terms that imply something the product isn't) and manipulating the product to make it, well, better. I'm glad to see legislation passed to ban the marketing of "light" cigarettes; I was steamed when it came out that low-fat frozen dessert CremaLita was a flat-out lie. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the anti-McDonald's crusade--I hate that McDonald's has become a go-to meal option for so much of America, but it's not like most people get a triple-decker with fries because they think it's the most nutritious option available to them. Still, I see the point of the crusade: In a lot of communities, especially poor communities where the immediate stress relief of a milkshake is a helluva lot more appealing than a spinach salad, McDonald's is a social center; by keeping their nutritional data hidden, they're doing a public health disservice. Fine.

But to accuse companies like Mars (which makes Snickers) of "manipulating" products so that they taste good is flat-out ridiculous. I'm well aware of the ways that sugar acts upon the nervous system, creating an addictive pattern of sorts--and the high-fructose corn syrup found in these products raises this pattern to a new level. But sugar is not crack, as much as some people would like to have you believe, and junk food is designed to taste good, and that's not manipulation--that's the nature of junk food.

America's food landscape is outrageous--of this I have no doubt. But I recently spent six weeks in Vietnam. And you know what they have in stores there? Candy bars, and boxes of cookies, and loads of candy. Coffee is consumed there with sweetened condensed milk, making our milk-and-sugar habit seem downright pure. Vietnam is a poor country, so people can't afford to gorge themselves on cookies, but that's not all of the equation. Americans are fat because we take emotional refuge in our excess; it's how we express both the pride and ennui that being the first of the first-world nations brings. Companies might exploit this tendency, but they are not creating it. I guess I'm coming down on the libertarian side of junk-food regulation at last.

8 Days a Week

I've worked in personal finance magazines for about six months now. And in that six months, my guardianship of my own personal finances has swelled--if not in quality, in quantity. I check my bank balances more frequently even when I know nothing has changed; I peruse my decimated 401(k) account; I idly poke around to find favorable money market rates. I'm not doing anything that differently than I did before working in personal finance mags. I'm not even thinking that differently about my finances--I've never been an out-of-control spender, nor miserly, and my interest in investing in anything beyond the rudiments is roughly equivalent to my interest in, say, bass fishing.

The difference is that I'm thinking more frequently. Money has been added to the treadmill of mundane questions that take up space in my mind: what am I doing tonight; what will I eat for dinner; should I go for a run later; what's my bank balance. It only made sense--I was suddenly reading about IRAs and financial solvency all day long, for my job. During my breaks from reading, my mind didn't easily make the switch to reading the headlines or composing an e-mail--it needed a transition, and checking my own financial solvency provided it.

A few months into this, on a day when I was checking my checking account balance for the third time that day, it hit me: If my new gig brought about a sudden uptick in my financial self-awareness, what had ten years in women's magazines done to me? A decade of reading about "loving your body" next to diet tips; of the assumption that whether to pain ourselves for beauty is not the question, but rather how much; of staying within the comfortable universe padded by birth control and makeup removers and 12 blouses I needed now.

Granted, what brought me into personal finance publishing was being unexpectedly laid off--hardly an event that brings out my financial devil-may-care side. And it wasn't like I had no idea that working in women's magazines had done a number on my head. But I didn't realize how insidious the damage could be until then. As a feminist I consciously strained against several tenets of women's magazines; I read relationship columns with a wry eye and treated beauty pieces as foreign-language copy as much as I could. But that's just it: as much as I could wasn't ever going to be enough to truly shield me from absorbing the messages I read all day long.

Hmm, could I get therapy bills for body dysmorphia covered under workman's comp?

Particularly helpful Webster's definitions, II

ri•pie•no \ri-'pya-no\ n: TUTTI

Joke's On You

Something about this April Fool's Day joke by Improv Everywhere really irks me. The group is known for pulling outlandish pranks in public places--they're most known for their annual no-pants subway ride, which began with a group of people coordinating to ride the subway together, in January, without pants, while pretending not to know each other or even notice that something strange was afoot. (It's now sort of an annual parade, with thousands of participants in cities across the world.)

The joke was that they posted on their website that they crashed a funeral: They claimed that they selected a funeral in which the deceased had few family and friends, and then showed up en masse to make it the "best funeral ever." They didn't actually do anything so crude, of course; the joke was not on the nonexistent grievers, but on the viewers of the website. It's a clever conceit--here's a group known for doing mildly outrageous things, and so it's plausible that aficionados would believe that they'd do something like crash a funeral. (A local news channel even covered it--funnily enough, acknowledging the funeral-crashing as an April Fool's joke but apparently unaware that the whole thing was a setup.)

But here's the thing: I was suckered in for a minute or two. But instead of thinking, "What assholes" (or, as some misguided commenters on the site wrote, "How thoughtful"), I thought, "They really don't stop at anything, do they?" Something as intrusive as crashing a funeral somehow seemed like a natural extension of the invasive things this group does, in the name of fun.

I used to support the idea of public pranks, probably because I appreciated their revolutionary roots. When Joey Skaggs took a busful of hippies to a residential area of Queens in a faux-tourism program, he was highlighting the ways in which mainstream culture attempted to marginalize revolutionary forces by turning the freak flag in the other direction. Robert Delford Brown's "Mr. Jesus Christ Contest" called attention to the sexism (and general ludicrousness) of the Catholic church. (In writing this I learned that Mr. Brown recently passed away; here is his obituary.)

There's still some of that: Evan Roth's TSA Communication project, which utilizes flexible sheets of stainless steel to communicate messages to airport security workers viewing X-rays of your luggage, highlights how ridiculous this aspect of the "war on terror" really is. Improv Everywhere commandeered the flagship Abercrombie & Fitch store (which hires live shirtless male models to stand around the store during business hours) with dozens of shirtless not-models, a funny juxtaposition of images of physical ideals. And there's nothing wrong per se with the pranks designed simply to amuse or delight--Improv Everywhere's most delightful mission to date has been the "freezing" of Grand Central Station, in which 200 people simultaneously froze in place for 60 seconds in the bustling station, bringing a sense of wonder to all who were lucky enough to witness it.

But then there's the crowd who gathered to cheer on a random dude as he ate a sandwich. And those who welcomed back total strangers with balloons and signs at the airport. Some of the people surprised in these videos appear vaguely pleased--all seemed bewildered--but they all sort of reassure the videographer, "Oh, this is so nice of you." Self-indulgent seems the better word here--while the strangers chosen at random to be participants came away from the episodes with a story, none of them seemed, well, happy about it. The improv agents, however, seem supremely thrilled.

It's interesting that so many of these pranks revolve around singling out a person and turning them into a public spectacle. It's hardly news that our culture has gotten more and more celebrity-happy, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that not everybody wants that. Being a celebrity because you choose it is one thing; being cheered on by a group of strangers as you try to finish your sandwich is another. There's zero collective spirit involved in this--instead of making passersby ponder what's going on (which was the beauty of the Grand Central Station freeze), it's all about pointing the finger, turning on the camera, and forcing people to make a go of it, like it or not.

There's another strain of prank that engineers public spectacles of supposedly sentimental events. The fake subway wedding proposal, which roped in passersby to hold up "Will" "you" "marry" "me?" signs. The staged romance of leading a cab driver believe he's helping two star-crossed lovers find one another. It all seems harmless enough, until you think of how that driver might feel were he to discover that he was duped into thinking he was performing a small miracle, when really he was a hipster puppet. More than that, however, it takes away from the feats of daily magic, small and large, that are real: seeing two dear old friends run into each other on the bus and watching one of them cry tears of joy when the other announces her pregnancy; witnessing a small act of grace as a woman in a business suit wordlessly hands a crying teenager a packet of tissues in the park; watching as two subway musicians stroll into the same subway car from opposite ends and proceed to perform an impromptu duet.

[Final crank side note: The Urban Prankster site gets negative points for having a background that appears to be smudges. Amusing idea, except for those who actually smudge their screen trying to wipe away the nonexistent dust. (It was merely an annoyance to me, but I know graphic designers who depend upon a pristine screen to do their job smoothly and would find this downright meanspirited.)]

Reasons to Be Pretty

I went into Reasons to Be Pretty, the new Neil LaBute show on Broadway, expecting to hate it. The show is about what happens when Greg, our protagonist, offhandedly tells his douchey friend that his girlfriend's face is "regular" (instead of beautiful) -- and she finds out. It has all the ingredients of a LaBute sexist cocktail, in the vein of In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. The surprise here is that in dealing with the beauty myth, one of the most enduring facets of sexism in America, he managed to create a work that wasn't sexist.

Part of me wants to know what Reasons to Be Pretty would be like if written by a woman -- someone who lived with the beauty standard inside and out, every day. But part of LaBute's point is that men, because they are outside of the beauty standard, cannot understand; instead, they have to try to grasp the significance to the women in their lives of something as potent and volatile as beauty. Women may have to deal with it in a harsher, more daily light, but because of that we intrinsically understand it, even if we're left inarticulate of anything but academic-critique language to describe its effects. Men are left to watch. (Or exploit. Which LaBute, true to form, shows with Greg's buddy Kent, who will surely be played by Aaron Eckhart in the movie.)

It's rare to see tales of the beauty myth from a personal perspective in anything other than a story about overcoming self-hatred. That tack is important, but it doesn't come close to belying the acute pain that the beauty standard brings; we know our own worst moments, but we don't know those of others. Reasons to Be Pretty would be absurd if Steph were freaking out over a female friend saying she had a "regular" face. The play works because the beauty myth creeps into intimate relationships, preying on the very uncertainty that often accompanies romance. Instead of verging on cries of "reverse sexism," as The Shape of Things did, LaBute manages to show why he, as a man, is uniquely qualified to tell this story about the beauty standard.

When, in the play's climax, Greg tells Steph that he was ambivalent about his feelings for her -- it comes off as a stroke of love, believe it or not -- we're left wondering if he's lying in order to sever their tie so that she might be able to embark on a new relationship where the word regular will never cut like a knife. In his author's note, LaBute writes that Greg "just might be one of the few adults I've ever tackled." I can only hope that LaBute himself is growing up and that he can continue to add to the growing number of men in the public eye who are examining gender and sexism with openness and concern for both themselves and the women around them -- not defensiveness.

McCain Wins

I just want to give props to my favorite McCain, Meghan, who wrote this straightforward response to Laura Ingraham's commentary on McCain's weight. (McCain criticized Ann Coulter for her, well, Ann Coulterness; Ingraham then criticized McCain on her radio show for her attack on Coulter -- and, in doing so, made a total non-sequitur reference to her weight. Which is, for the record, a healthy one.)

One thing I'd like to note, though, is that this is widely being seen as a critique of McCain's weight -- which Ingraham undoubtedly intended it to be. But what she actually said was that McCain was too heavy to be a contestant on The Real World. Putting aside the general ridiculousness of using anybody's supposed unsuitability for The Real World as an insult, this isn't a critique of McCain's weight; it's a vocalization of the sheer facts. McCain, simply by being a normal-sized adult woman (at a self-proclaimed size 8, she's still smaller than the average), probably is too heavy to be in contention for the "hot chick" role on those sort of shows, in the same way that most plus-size models are actually too slender to gracefully wear plus-size clothing. (Industry standard for plus-size models is size 12; Lane Bryant sizes begin at 14.)

I'm sure that Ingraham had zero intention of semi-critiquing size standards in the media, but in a way that's what she did. The insult wasn't "You're fat," it was "You're too heavy to be on reality TV." (It could also be read as a notation on why one's suitability for television is the beauty standard, or the ridiculousness that anybody's real body could be considered too big for "reality" TV.) No credit goes to her, though; I'm saving that for McCain. I love how she consistently kept the focus on Ingraham and the ridiculousness of her comments, instead of falling for the bait and wailing about how she's not really fat at all. She also took the opportunity to note that even though she wasn't overweight, that didn't matter; it's the critique that's wrongheaded, no matter the size of the target body.