WTF Cosmo?

I haven't read Cosmopolitan since I was a teenager. But yesterday, I ended clicking on a link from Facebook, not sure for what or why. Returning to the browser today, I noticed a suggested link: "Our Latest Naughty Sex Position: The Whistleblower" 

Seriously, Cosmo? Seriously? That "story" is half-heartily trying to be topical yet missing the mark by so much that it inspires one and only response of WTF? I just tried to imagine how this post came to be. I started writing, but it just led me to write: stupid and uninformed, I guess that sums up the writing stuff & readership of this magazine, so why even bother. Ugh.

For People Who Never Experienced Depression

At first, I'd try to explain that it's not really negativity or sadness anymore, it's more just this detached, meaningless fog where you can't feel anything about anything — even the things you love, even fun things — and you're horribly bored and lonely, but since you've lost your ability to connect with any of the things that would normally make you feel less bored and lonely, you're stuck in the boring, lonely, meaningless void without anything to distract you from how boring, lonely, and meaningless it is. 

This is a nearly perfect explanation of what it is like to be depressed. The sense of nothingness & deadening of feeling is captured perfectly. Go read it if you know someone who is depressed or you've experienced the crushing weight of depression yourself.

And that's the most frustrating thing about depression. It isn't always something you can fight back against with hope. It isn't even something — it's nothing. And you can't combat nothing. You can't fill it up. You can't cover it. It's just there, pulling the meaning out of everything. That being the case, all the hopeful, proactive solutions start to sound completely insane in contrast to the scope of the problem.

Perfect Saturday Night Song

Makes me want to twirl.
Michael Jackson Edit "Get Lucky" Daft Punk ft. Pharrell

College Is Mostly Useless Waste of Money (unless you're the sciences, engineering, or mathematics)

Why a liberal arts degree is a waste. It starts out with the premise of Salon.com's profile of two hipsters buying their precious food with food stamps. Other reasons why I loved this post is that it refers to Russians Asians which I thought was a term only I used in my head. Sweeeet. The whole post is brilliant.

First, the obvious: what's wrong with hipsters on food stamps is that these are college educated people who should be able to get jobs, not live off the state.   They're not black, after all.  Hell, one of the two in the article is even Asian.  "What, like Russian Asian?"  No, like Asian Asian.  "Whaaaaaaat?"
"It's the economy, stupid!"  Thanks guy from 1992, but the economy did not tell you to go to college for something you knew in advance would make you unemployable, especially when that unemployable choice cost exactly the same as the employable choice, i.e. too much.  Lesson one at the academia should be the importance of separating vocation from avocation, as character actor Fred Thompson and electrical contractor Benjamin Franklin both understood. When I was six I wanted to be in Playboy.  Just because it's your dream, doesn't mean you should pursue it.   
So what makes them hatable is the seeming choice they have made: they could work, yes at jobs they don't like but hey, that's America; but instead they choose to feel entitled to  $200/month from the rest of us salarymen. 
However, secondly:
Before we blame them for their choice, we should ask why they felt they could make that choice.  I'm not trying to start trouble, but let's choose something I'm familiar with, i.e. women: why would a smart high school junior, 4.0 and AP Everything, think that going to Hampshire College for English Literature was a good idea?  Why would her parents allow this madness, other than the fact that they were divorcing?  What did she think would happen given that she knew in advance there were no jobs for English majors?  Serious answers, please, I'll offer four I had personal experience with: law school; academia; non-profits; marriage.  Don't roll your eyes at me, young lady: let's say you are the daughter of a lawyer and you major in English.  When you were 17 and you imagined your life at your Dad's age-- not the starving poetess fantasy you wrote about in your spiral notebook, but a glimpse of the bourgeois future you then thought you didn't want-- what kind of a house did you imagine in the "if that happens to me I'll Anne Sexton myself" scenario?  A lawyer's house or an English major's house? In other words, the choice to major in English was predicated on information she received from multiple sources like schools and TV-- sources I will collectively call the Matrix--  that every generation does better than the last, that there was a safety net of sorts, a bailout at the end, that future happiness was inevitable, and so we return to economics: the general name for that safety net is credit.  America was the land of the minimum monthly payment.  And if this analogy isn't clear enough for you, let me reverse it: the ability of the economy to offer English as a major required a massive subsidy to make you feel like $20k/yr was the same as free.  If you had to pay it up front, you'd either be an engineer or $80k richer.  That subsidy is now worthless, not because the money doesn't exist but because the bailout at the end, e.g the four options I suggested were operational 1977-1999 which guaranteed the payments would be made, won't help.

Read the whole thing.

I'm kind of stealing this from Peter but I'm of the long held belief that not everyone needs a 4 year degree. In fact before planning on getting a MSW, I was seriously considering going to a trade school because I was desperate to do something useful.

I remember Betka (older physicisit sister) (and my mother) urging me to not get an English degree right before I went and got an English (granted I actually thought I would be a librarian/archivist) a completely useless piece of paper that cost me dearly (more emotionally than monetarily). Because even though a BA means nothing, it's still a prerequisite to be secretary I mean, office assistant. Ugh.

Lyrics of the Night

While you was gone 

you must have done a lot of favors 

You've got a whole lot of things

I don't think That you could ever have paid for - Songs: Ohia

Succinct and cut throat equals me swooning at the lyrics.

30 лет

I still feel like a child.

Accepting Visitors

Yesterday we had a little visitor in our apartment. A mouse was discovered. I stood on a chair for a minute. Then climbed down and proceeded to figure out where it came from with Peter. Peter discovered a hole in the wall and stuffed it up with metal mesh. Hopefully the little (cute according to Peter) critter will not be coming back. The oven top has been thoroughly cleaned and the inside of the oven is next on my list of disinfecting the whole kitchen area.

I'm becoming much more calmer about rodents in my home. The worst part is to hear the sound and not see that which is making the noise. But the actual disgust has for the most part has evaporated, which shows that adaptability is possible.

Melodramatic Pop

I've been listening to a lot of power ballads in Korean. I think love songs in a foreign language makes them that much more appealing. Emotion without the horrible words that get in the way. Either that or I have terrible taste in music.



I actually like this lyric-less version even more:


P.S. I cheated, the lyrics are not half bad.

Some day, a long time from now
These rays of light
Remember the trip
I took to be next to you

At a seashore far away
At the end of the sky somewhere
Keep the precious memories
Of you and me
A blinding vision of azure
You’re my sea
When I gave you my hand
Your dreams broke into white pieces

I’m planning on taking a long trip
A voyage deep into the sea
The smooth, silvery ripples
Take my body to you
A blinding vision of azure
You’re my sea
When I gave you my hand a white
Burst of your smile
You know, too, that I
Love you very much
Wrap me in your softness

 Official version of Badayeohaeng:

 

Song of the Day

The repeating of "don't go" at the end is quite heartbreaking. One should listen to sad songs when happy, right? Apparently I do it all the time.

Another spoke in the wheel of corruption. Don't like how the Supreme Court might rule, pull some shady practices to get to the case before the Court can even hear the case. Not to mention the dubious practice of " disparate-impact theory, which purports to prove racial discrimination by examining statistics rather than intent or specific cases." You know, because, I guess the theory goes, if the outcome isn't fair, according to your standards, someone needs to be responsible. No matter how arbitrary and damaging the results of holding "someone responsible."

Congressmen Darrell Issa, Lamar Smith and Patrick McHenry, along with Senator Chuck Grassley, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, are investigating the St. Paul quid pro quo, and with good reason. To recap: A senior Justice Department official, Mr. Perez, intervened to undermine two civil complaints against the City of St. Paul in order to get St. Paul to drop a Supreme Court case that might have blown apart the legal rationale for his dubious discrimination crusade against law-abiding businesses.

Making the world more fair, through on unfair means. Awesome.

Quote of the Day

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
                  - Anton Chekhov

On Bourdain's Decline

I thoroughly enjoyed this little take down by Andy Greenwald partially of the Food Network (easy target) and partially of Anthony Bourdain's dissent into everything he used to decry. It was witty (I enjoyed the footnotes) and on point. I also like the author for not just writing a "selling out" piece. Look, for the right price most people do sell out.

At its foul-mouthed best, Tony Bourdain's shtick is absolutely empowering, but not in thefaux-populist manner of a Sandra Lee or Guy Fieri. What's made his voice so important is his steadfast refusal to coddle anything but eggs.⁷ Unlike most food shows, the central message of No Reservations was actually, no, you can't do this; you can't cook it, you can't re-create it, you can't dumb it down. Bourdain was a knight-errant of good taste, a champion of expertise and authenticity. Real food experiences, he argued, whether at a sushi counter in Tokyo or a hot dog stand in Chicago, are worth seeking out. Appreciation is just as important as enthusiasm. 

Which is precisely what makes his involvement in ABC's The Taste⁸ so disheartening. "This is a cooking competition unlike any other," Bourdain brayed at the start of the series last month. It was a lie. There have been plenty of terrible cooking competitions in the past, though maybe none as teeth-grindingly cringey as this one. Conceived as a glitzy, kitchen-oriented version of The Voice, here it's the judges who must repeatedly open their gobs, the better to shove in an unending conveyor belt of porcelain spoons. Every spoon arrives laden with a "perfect bite," each one cynically crafted by one of a well-groomed armada of knife-wielding fameballs. The idea, the show repeatedly tells us with all the subtlety of a Sriracha shooter, is that only through blind tastings and novelty flatwear can food actually be judged by its most important characteristic: The Tas — oh, I can't even bring myself to type it. 

Look, it's perfectly fine for Bourdain to cash in and try new things. He's spent a decade traversing the world, consuming calories as if they were frequent flyer miles, and collecting hangovers like snow globes. He's 56 years old, married, with a 5-year-old daughter. Everyone deserves a chance to experiment, and I've got nothing at all against selling out.⁹ But Bourdain's entire post–Kitchen Confidential career — embodying his bedrock belief that food cannot and should not be separated from the richness of experience that surrounds it — has been an eloquently stated and vibrantly lived refutation of everything The Taste stands for. Now he sits on a garishly lit soundstage, defanged like an aging circus lion, ginning up halfway constructive things to say to deluded Capoeira instructors who make "food for awesomeness" when the only reasonable response would be laughter.

Read the whole thing. I've been reading a bunch stuff on Grantland and have been thoroughly impressed aka entertained.

This. Is. Hilarious.

Oh yeah. Laura Croft & pervy Conan. Triple like.



via

Commercial Gazing

I really like the Windows "Surface" commercial. Especially the Catholic school girls hip hop dancing. The expression on their faces is pure awesome.

Kid of the 90's

I'm posting a commercial. But it's okay because it made me nostalgic for my youth.

Girl On The Beach

I'm not into Marilyn worship, but I do like this photo.

On The Meaning Of Life

I've been watching a lot of X-Files lately. A lot. In fact I'm already on Season 5 after starting a few months ago. I love the deep love and respect Mulder & Scully have for each other. I love the subtle and sarcastic humor of Mulder. I appreciate the macabre if not right out love it. I also love the dialogue, less the voice overs that accompany some episodes - I was looking for a quote from Mulder about how the meaning of life is the struggle to give it meaning but instead I found this quote, which I kind of adore.

SCULLY: Have you thought seriously about dying?

MULDER: Yeah, once, when I was at the Ice Capades.

SCULLY: When I was fighting my cancer, I was angry at the injustice of it and its meaninglessness. And then I realized that that was the struggle - to give it meaning. To make sense of it. It's like life.

MULDER: I think Nature is supremely indifferent to whether we live or die. I mean, if you're lucky you get 75 years. If you're really lucky you get 80 years. And if you're extraordinarily lucky, you get to have 50 of those years with a decent head of hair. 

Recently Listened to Bossypants by Tina Fey

I liked it well enough. She brought up some interesting points, specifically about New York living and separate standards for women and men in comedy and how it is changing. However, this is basically an excuse to post a photo of her.