Update: He Died.

Yesterday, when I wrote this, Fred Phelps, founder of Westboro Baptist Church, was still alive.

Related Post: More hateful stuff from Rush Limbaugh

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Perfect Storm: Versailles, Tiny House, Concord and DeLillo

If I’m not careful, this post will come off as nothing more than a fawning review of Lauren Greenfield’s new documentary The Queen of Versailles. For you Chicagoans, it’s at The Music Box and you should absolutely go see it right now. It’s about the Siegels, a richer-than-God Florida couple who are building the biggest house in American in 2008, right as the market tanks.

Here’s the official trailer:

When was the last time you saw a piece of art or heard a piece of music that stuck with you days later? I can’t shake this movie from my brain; everything else I read or see seems to echo one of its themes, images, lines.

I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and each passage about consumer culture, Americana, perceptions of luxury, etc is reverberating extra hard against the backdrop of Versailles. Then, I read this great New Yorker essay (sadly behind a paywall) about Concord, MA, and the town’s weird peccadillos around wealth and showmanship, and the Versailles bells started bellowing again. And then, this finance newsletter I get had a story about the tiny house movement, about a couple that downsized into 128 square feet in pursuit of the things that truly made them happy. Ding ding ding!

I love this feeling; it’s what I felt like I was always pursuing in college. When the reading from one class informed the lecture of another, and both of those added layers of nuance to the novel I was reading, and all of that seemed related to dining hall convo. It’s a rare but magical perfect storm and I feel like I’m right in the middle of one right now. Crossing my fingers that it lasts for a while.

This intersection of material is all about happiness, finding it, affording it, keeping it, sharing it. How do you tell which path or paths will lead there? Can you buy it? Can you buy access to it? Do I have any answers? Of course not, I’m just enjoying the questions.

Related Post: Another perfect storm, Hans Rosling and Cloud Atlas.

Related Post: Another perfect storm, tigers and grandparents.

How Chick-fil-A Learned about Trade-Offs

Mayor Menino

You’ve probably seen Boston Mayor Tom Menino’s letter to Chick-fil-A floating around the web today, declining the chain a location in Boston’s commercial landscape:

dsf

“There is no place for discrimination on Boston’s Freedom Trail and no place for your company alongside it.”

There’s also a lot of squawking about free speech on behalf of Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy, who made the homophobic comments that kicked off the shit storm. Those people, the free-speechers, are right. He can voice his opinions and beliefs, and some might even say, as a business leader and community leader, he should.

But, and this harkens back to Daniel Tosh’ internet beating last week, being free to speak your mind is not the same as being free from criticism once you do so. Would I support Chick-fil-A protesters throwing rocks through the storefront window or threatening Cathy? No, of course not. Do I think they should have their licenses revoked due to his personal beliefs? Of course not. That said, say something bigoted, and people may choose to take their business elsewhere.

There are trade-offs to be made, here, right? Between supporting our values with our dollars and living a pragmatic, practical, convenient life. I struggle with clothes shopping for this reason, but we all have to make these decisions every day. How much and at what cost are you willing to compromise?

There’s a gender studies concept called the “patriarchal bargain” in which women (and men) play into gender stereotypes for the sake of their own personal advantage, undermining the overall cause of equality. If Kim Kardashian makes millions playing a hot ditz on television, who cares if she detracts from society’s perception of women and their value? We all make patriarchal bargains any time we choose to adhere to gender stereotypes to make life easier (shaving my armpits, wearing mascara, letting a man pay for my drink), it’s just of question a degrees.

The Chick-fil-A question asks us about our willingness to make a similar bargain, an “I’m-a-real-world-consumer bargain”. If I buy a sandwich at Subway instead of Chick-fil-A today, does it matter? What percentage of my purchase would be supporting, even in the vaguest sense, anti-gay advocacy? 3 cents? 8 cents? How much do I care to not drop 3 cents in an bigotry bucket?

On the other hand, the more successful Chick-fil-A becomes, the bigger platform we give Dan Cathy from which to voice his homophobic beliefs.

Related Post: More from MA: How I wish the Brown/Warren debate had gone down.

Related Post: Kelly Ripa on gendered dating assumptions.

Room to Room

Fire safety sticker

On Monday, I said goodbye to my childhood home. It will be several more weeks before my family vacates the house, but due to my insistence on living a thousand miles away, my farewells came early.

While the piles of trophies, books, photos, postcards, letters, movie ticket stubs (I’m a hoarder, after all), lay untouched and unsorted, I wandered around the house. Room to room, my eyes went past the furniture and accessories; those things will travel.

It was the paint color I wanted to remember, the moulding in the corner, the loose knobs on the doors. Those details are the ones we can’t cart away and recreate.

Height marks on the closet door

How many steps are there to my bedroom? What do the neighbors houses look like from each window? Where exactly does the sun fall on the carpet? Isn’t that where the cat used to stretch out for a nap?

After I finished my tour of the untransferable details, I looked for the ones that, though small enough to slip into boxes, wouldn’t be making the trip.

Seashells

A row of seashells on the bathroom ledge. Height marks ticked into the whitewashed closet door. Three Zits cartoons haphazardly taped to my brothers’ wall; his name is Jeremy, too, and his clothes also smell. In his room, peeling and nearly transparent twenty years later, is the sticker that alerts the fire department to the presence of a child.

Obama love

In the kitchen, where the home phone used to live, there are more pictures of the Obama family than ours. “Well, they send me photos!” explains my mother.

Outside, overgrown with tiger lilies, there’s a small marker for the family cat. I tried to capture the precise angle of the adirondacks in the yard, wanting to remember exactly how they sat. The buoys hanging on the garage door, the birdhouse I painted ten years ago, the tiled steps my mom made that lead to the wood pile.

I took pictures from every angle I could think to take pictures. When I can’t remember exactly in what order the glass jars sat on the ledge, or the placement of the fire department sticker, or the deep teal of the bathroom, I’ll have something to bolster my memory.

Related Post: I get my hoarding from my father.

Related Post: My town + Amy Poehler

Sunday Scraps 55

1. INCARCERATION: Photo series from Wired inside of juvenile detention centers. Remind me again how we justify putting children in rooms like these for any period of time?

2. BOOKS: Saundra Mitchell articulately points out that girls read books with boy protagonists all the time, and consequently the argument that we need more YA boy books is flawed. We need to teach boys that some stories are universal.

3. DATING: GOOD Magazine does a whole series on deal breakers. Since DealBreakers is one of my favorite I’ve-had-a-lot-of-wine-and-I-want-to-make-lists games, I enjoyed it very much.

4. ABORTION: Amazing piece in the NYT by Susan Heath telling the common, but often untold, story of married mothers who seek the services of Planned Parenthood.

5. INK: Nerdy tattoos. Many are too nerdy for me to get, but I’m nonetheless fascinated by the things people choose to wear forever.

6. MASSACHUSETTS: List of fake town names from my home state in McSweeney’s. I’ve since learned this will probably not be funny unless you’re from Massachusetts.

Related Post: Sunday last, Trayvon and race, Peter Dinklage, used yoga mats.

Related Post: Two Sundays past, nail art, baby ear piercing, Romans vs. the U.S. military.

I Think Amy Poehler May Have Served Me Steak Fries

If you’re familiar with Stars Hollow then you pretty much know what my town looks like. If you’re not, Jesus, go watch some Gilmore.

In all seriousness, Lexington, MA, was a lovely, quaint place to grow up. Within one block, there was a candy store called Candy Castle, a toy store called Catch a Falling Star, and a pet store called Warm Hearts, Cold Noses. How much more nauseating can you get?

It’s a place full of history and monuments and for the month of April, Revolutionary War reenactors wandering around in buckled-shoes and tri-corner hats. Could I tell you what happened at the Alamo? Not a chance, but could I narrate the Battle of Lexington minute-by-minute for you? You bet.

The esteemed alums of Lexington High School include a Survivor winner, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, and most notably (in my opinion), SNL‘s own Rachel Dratch. In this very charming interview, Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch discuss, among other things, working at Chadwick’s in Lexington. Chadwick’s, for those of you not in the know, was an amazing establishment with ridiculously large steak fries, a Belly Buster ice cream sundae, and the loudest, ear-splitting Happy Birthday renditions I’ve ever heard. They closed their doors sometime in the mid-90s, and birthdays were never the same.

I can’t figure out the exact math, but if Poehler or Dratch was serving up sundaes when they came home from college, there’s a not terrible chance one of them once sang me a horrendous Happy Birthday.

Related Post: Lexington is the best on April 19th.

Related Post: Small town police logs. 

MA Reconsiders Custody Bias

I have tangled with the Men’s Rights movement before, usually in the comments section of my Good Men Project articles. The most frustrating thing about that crew, besides their vitriolic hate speech towards feminists and the occasional personal insult, is that sometimes they are right.

There are gender biases that cut in all directions, and I don’t think it’s fair for feminists to argue that women always get the brunt of it. Most of the time? Yes (especially in these last trying months). But are there are occasions where men get screwed based on sex-based prejudice? Yes. Should we rectify those as well? Absolutely.

Massachusetts is putting together a task force to reconsider its child custody laws. From the Boston Globe:

“Advocates for custody reform aren’t going away; they are among the loudest and most persistent constituencies to lobby state government today. Their passion bespeaks a genuine need to examine the workings of family courts, and to determine whether some complaints about bias have merit. And while some shared-parenting advocates won’t be satisfied with anything less than joint custody in all cases, others have suggested smaller changes in law and practice that are worthy of discussion. These include tweaks in the language used in domestic relations cases – such as replacing the term “visitation’’ with “parenting time’’ – and changes in the restraining-order process that would encourage more healthy contact between parents and children.”

As the child of a less-than-amicable divorce but a successful joint-custody arrangement, I have strong feelings on the subject. I think the presumptive default should be joint custody, and then you work from there. I don’t think that one situation fits all families (and thus I would not be in favor of a mandated arrangement), but I do believe we need to begin with the assumption that both parents have equal access to and engagement with their children.

Part of my feminism is ceding the assumption that women are “naturally” better parents. Our culture favors caregiving for women and breadwinning for men in a myriad of de facto and de jure ways. We need to fix the legal double standards (i.e .provide parental leave across the board), and we need work to scrub the prejudice from judicial discretion as well. Beginning from a place of equality seems like a good start.

Do women request full custody more often then men? Yes. Will you still likely end up with more custody arrangements that favor the mother, probably yes. But, you will also end up with fewer disenfranchised fathers, and fewer “every other weekend” models, and fewer kids that view their dads as glorified babysitters instead of engaged parents.  Using gender as the launching point for a conversation about custody is unfair to dads, reinforces stereotypes about men and parenting, and deprives kids of seeing their fathers as primary caregivers.

Related Post: Dads in advertising.

Related Post: Dads, daughters and body image.

Meryl + Ellen + Deborah

Does it get any better than this?

When Meryl tarted talking about the first woman to take a bullet for the United States, I had a sudden and overpowering urge to raise my hand and shout “Call on me! Call on me! I know the answer!”

You can tell I was really fun in elementary school, right?

Growing up in Massachusetts, we often skip crucial parts of American history (Alamo what?) in order to review, for the seventh consecutive year, the Revolutionary War. What can I say, proximity rules. Of the many, many books we read about colonial New England (Johnny Tremain, April Morning, etc) none sticks in my mind more than Ann McGovern’s The Secret Soldier. Deborah Sampson was the shiiiit.

I love when Meryl and I are on the same page.

Related Post: Here’s how not to teach eighth graders about slavery.

Related Post: How many essays could you read an hour, if you really had to?

How I Wish the Warren/Brown Showdown Had Occurred

Elizabeth Warren

Here’s what happened: Elizabeth Warren is running against Scott Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat. We all I know I have a big crush on her and that I’m contemplating moving back east just to vote for her (not really). At a Senate primary debate, the moderator mentioned that Brown had partially paid for law school by posing nude in Cosmopolitan and asked the candidates how they had afforded their educations. Elizabeth Warren joked, “I kept my clothes on.”

The next day, in response to Warren’s joke, Scott Brown said “Thank God!” on a morning talk show. This is how a firestorm starts.

People are all up on Scott Brown for denigrating the appearance of Elizabeth Warren, and yeah.. he kind of deserves it. It’s a fratty, sophomoric jab that undermines Warren’s qualifications by focusing attention on her looks. But, and it pains me to say this, Elizabeth Warren was kind of asking for it. The premise of the moderator’s stupid question was that paying for Brown’s education by very legal albeit potentially embarrassing methods is somehow relevant to Brown’s candidacy. It’s not. Elizabeth Warren knows it’s not, but she validated the premise of the question by distancing herself from Brown’s history with her “clothes on” joke. She’s way too smart for this crap.

Imagine the situation were reversed. A woman poses for Maxim in college to help foot the bills. 20+ years later, she runs for office much to the guffaws of her constituents. She wins. Four years later, a male opponent is asked about his college bills, and he says “I kept my clothes on.” Sexist, right? And irrelevant! We’d be up in arms! At least, I know I would.

The real villain in this scenario is whoever wrote that ridiculous question. If you’re trying to ask about the very real, tangible concern of the rising cost of college, then ask that. If you’re trying to understand the lengths that American families have to go to in order to put their kids through UMass, then ask that. Don’t dredge up this shit. It’s a waste of everybody’s time, and it condones the inclusion of personal, legal decisions that candidates made decades ago into their qualifications for office.

When Elizabeth Warren got that question, I wish she had taken the high road and skipped the joke. In fact, I wish the question hadn’t been asked. I wish that everyone in this scenario behaved like adults on whom rests the well being of real families and their communities. This is some high school bullshit, and I expect more of both of them.

Related Post: Why I don’t care who Sarah Palin banged in 1987.

Related Post: A note on why I don’t think sexual hypocrisy justifies the airing of private business.

Elizabeth Warren in Two Minutes

Reasons I want to move back to Massachusetts:

1. It’d be nice to see my family more often.

2. I want to vote for Elizabeth Warren for Senate.

She’s currently on her talking tour around the state raising dough and name recognition in her bid to take on Scott Brown. Hot damn, this is going to be an interesting race. Brown is popular, and the part of Massachusetts between Boston and and Smith College isn’t as bright blue as the state’s voting record would suggest.

I can’t wait for debate season, just watch this clip. Girlface is on fire (just wait for the :52 mark):

It’s also a really great counter argument to the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that folks opposing social services and public works tend to project. It goes like this, “I didn’t need help, I made my own money, why should I pay for you lazy jerks?” Warren points out the foundational structures that support everybody’s business, no matter how brilliant and entrepreneurial.

“You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.”

My favorite line (and everybody else’s): “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.”

Absentee ballot? Hmmmmmm….

Related Post: Another viral youtube clip, Zach Wahls on gay marriage.

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