Ladies Night

In English, there really isn't a gendered equivalent to the term Ladies Man. And no, I don't mean the sleazy Tim Meadows' SNL character of the same name and of reputed courvoisier-sipping fame. Taken literally, ladies man could be a male who is most comfortable in the company of females.

Were the situation reversed, you would never call such a gal a Gentleman's Lady. Not only does the phrase sound clunky off the tongue, it doesn't feel like the right descriptor. Call me what you will, but I am woman who feels most herself in the company of men.

In high school, I was thick as thieves with many great girlfriends, spending a particularly high amount of time with my field hockey and lacrosse teammates. But in the decade since, I've amassed a much higher number of male friends, probably at a three-to-one ratio. Case and point, at my wedding, I was supported by a Maid of Honor (my sister and only sibling) and a self-proclaimed Man of Dishonor (also known as my gay best friend, a frequent contributor to this blog).

Ever since arriving in San Antonio, I've greatly expanded my set of female friends - warm, funny, smart, awesome women. Last night I went out for "girls night," a casual dinner and wine tasting at a local haunt. It's been forever since I did something like this. While we talked about lots of things, at one point, the conversation turned to bras and turned sharply to boobs. Ladies night out, indeed.

Between the 10 of us, we have well over 150 years of brassiere wearing experience. Yet, despite our assumed expertise on the topic, no one had a solid recommendation about the best bra on the market. We might as well have been rating jock straps or garden hoses, no one felt strongly enough about the matter to be able to tell a friend. There we were, ambivalent and to a degree, dissatisfied about nearly all bras for some reason or another.

In the past, I was tempted to try out the Spanx bra, a kind of revolutionary undergarment that seems to me, very 21st Century. Despite the fact that I've spent more money on clothing items I've barely worn, I just can never justify the $62 price tag. For you toothpicks and string beans out there, Spanx is a line of slimming undergarments designed for those of us who want to tighten up various body parts without actually exercising or dieting. They are, coincidentally, a life saver (and much sleeker and more comfortable than a rubber girdle).

Many women, myself included, also expressed an unwelcome anxiety associated with bra shopping, citing (oddly) two uncomfortable customer service experiences with meddling Russian salesladies. Given how self-conscious the shopping experience is, I know that I have just picked the best of the worst to escape the store and be done with the confounded chore.

Even though I didn't leave the evening with any special tips or insight into the issue, sometimes it's nice to be in a like-minded company of sisters.

What's in a Name?

johnnycake: noun - a baked cornmeal flatbread.

Johnny Cupcakes: proper noun - a store that once broke my heart.

About a month ago, my good friend Lisa and I were shopping on Newbury Street in Boston. We were fat and happy following a delicious lunch, but I was, as always, looking to become even fatter and happier with a little help from some baked goods.

We had just finished looking at handbags when we were drawn to an off-street-level shop by a force stronger than any martian tractor beam. There, in the window of a handsome brick building, was a giantline drawing of a cupcake with the word "fresh" dancing above it. Saliva moistened my mouth and my heart pumped faster than the beat of a Lady GaGa song at the thought of the sugar and sweet, spongy cakethat would be mine in just a few moments.

I had been to other upscale bakeries specializing in cupcakes, Sprinkles in Beverly Hills and Magnolia in New York City, and was over the moon that we stumbled on their Boston cousin. What would I choose? Red velvet? Chocolate coconut? Good old vanilla with chocolate frosting?

As Lisa and I climbed the steps towards our indulgence, we asked eachother, "How could these be calorie-free?" as another sign advertised. We found our answer when we entered Johnny Cupcakes.

It's not a bakery at all, but rather, a t-shirt store, with a signature logo replacing the skull in the familiar skull and crossbones design with the silhouette of a cupcake. Shirts are displayed in ovens, with their colorful fronts stylizing Pez dispensers, or bearing the slogan "always fresh-baked." That mayappeal to those who enjoy marijuana recreationally, but I don't, so wouldn't want a shirt that could be interpreted as such.

More garments show panda bears eating cupcakes. Now, I like pandas,and I like cupcakes, but I wanted to wrap my mouth around a glob of frosting, not a limited-edition shirt.

We sweet-tooth shoppers were terribly disappointed when we figured out the meaning of the calorie-free signs. Everyone else in the store seemed to know what was up, snatching Boston Red Sox-inspired cupcake shirts and holding them to their thin, never-eaten-a-cupcake bodies to check for size. I later learned Johnny Cupcakes is equally popular in other big cities, too, using fun events like grilled cheese parties to drive youthful consumers to the boutique shops.

The company website does indicate that if I were in the store on a weekend, and had bought a high-quality, made in the USA shirt, I would have gotten a real home-baked cupcake. The founder (whose name, I presume, is Johnny) also writes on his site that several colleges have invited him to lecture on effective branding and marketing. Still stung by not being able to satiate my craving for cream cheese frosting that day, I am quite sure I would skip that lecture.

I'm glad this company seems to be thriving. Too many stores along Newbury Street have closed. But I'm stubborn. I wouldn't buy a cupcake from a store called "World's Best T-Shirts," so I don't expect to buy a t-shirt from Johnny Cupcakes.

- Jacktastic

Happy Birthday?

One of my friends works in a very public job as a television reporter. As a result, he often has uncomfortable public encounters with viewers in which total strangers approach him, in a restaurant or the grocery store, as if they've known him for years. Given that he appears in their domestic space on a regular basis, I guess people feel like they know him. More than knowing him, they have no qualms about voicing their opinions about his hairstyle, his sexuality, his wardrobe or his work. In his time on the air, he's had more than his fair share of weird encounters with viewers, both face-to-face and via email.

Today is my friend's birthday and he just received the following bit of viewer mail:

You don't know me and I don't know you but for some reason I have it marked on my calendar that today is your birthday. If that's true, then Happy Birthday. I must say I was surprised that a conservative organization as [your station] would hire such a flamer as yourself but you showed us all how really good work speaks for itself. We are lucky to have you, Mr. [friend's last name].

Sincerely, (The viewer signed her name and gave her address)

An Editor's Meeting

Generally speaking, I've never shaken my youthful wanderlust. In fact, as I've aged, hitting the road has become a more frequent practice as I now have greater means and cause to roam.

For me, there's a special and almost equal pleasure in both visiting and revisiting places. I'm not claiming this as some earth shattering original observation, but all travelers know that in returning to visited city from one's past, it is often easier to spot the changes in yourself than the geography of the urban landscape. I believe that there's always a new adventure to be had on familiar terrain.

True to form, 2009 is already a year marked and defined by travel. In the past three months, my husband and I have crisscrossed the country visiting our relatives in Las Vegas, Scottsdale, and now Boston. This most recent weekend brought us to a symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While P completed his obligations, I was left with a very open schedule, ideal for leisure and play. On Friday, I met one of my closest friends from college (a frequent co-contributor / editor to this blog). In a sense, considering that we were both playing hooky from our professional obligations, we forgave ourselves from letting another week lapse without a CM post. We did TALK about the blog over our Wagamama lunch, taking stock of where we are and thinking about the future.

While we haven't been entirely faithful in our pledge to post weekly, one of the main reasons we launched this blog was to deepen the dialogue between friends separated across the miles. Our shared creative venture is a way to get beyond the brevity of a text message or dashed off email and move toward something more substantive. For me, I can say that it has been nice to write something that is not purely utilitarian - something that I know a handful of friends will read.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I want to make it clear that we're not claiming any great literary genius here. It's not that we shun the superficial - in fact we've done the opposite - we've taken the care and time to explore topics from the Octomom to sweatpants, but we've done so in more thoughtful, painstaking depth. My friend and I are both a little disappointed not to have a larger community of contributors, but it's good to have a goal and vision for the future.

A Star Is Born?

Nadya Suleman is like cigarette butts outside a strip bar: disgusting and everywhere. She’s on NBC’s Today Show in the morning, followed by Doctor Phil, and Entertainment Tonight later on. Taped portions of those appearances are then re-played ad nauseum on other syndicated shows and cable TV. If you’ve been in a coma, and don’t know who she is, you’re lucky. She is the “octomom,” the California woman who gave birth to octuplets by caesarean section in January.

At first blush, Suleman’s story seemed like it would have a miracle happy ending – her babies all survived, and we could have imagined her getting gifts from companies and individuals all over the country to help her with this unenviable challenge. But it quickly nose-dived, and the octomom was wrapped in the fat, dripping tentacles of scandal.It was discovered that the 33 year old already had six kids at home, and many people were outraged, believing the single woman’s in vitro fertilization treatments and the births they produced would only burden taxpayers funding Suleman’s public assistance. The fury even drew death threats, yet the octomom keeps up her rigorous schedule of television interviews.

Her demeanor is, not surprisingly, very strange in these interviews. She looks like a déclassé Angelina Jolie, but claims she’s not interested in being a celebrity. Yet Suleman makes herself a celebrity by appearing on entertainment show after entertainment show, presumably for money. Her constant mantra is that she needs a new home to raise her litter. She reportedly hasn’t responded to a pornographer’s offer of a $1 million payday to have sex on camera, though that would certainly go a long way towards buying a house and diapers times eight.

Since the octomom has become a (supposedly reluctant) pop culture fixture overnight, I think pop culture is where we can find solutions to some of her problems.

• Apu and Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon of The Simpsons are octoparents, too. Manjula was inadvertantly dosed with extra fertility drugs and produced eight kids. Our friends at Wikipedia tell me their names are Uma, Nabendu, Poonam, Priya, Sandeep, Sashi, Gheet, and Anoop. (Incidentally, the last of that list is my favorite, because American Idol had a contestant named Anoop this season whom I really liked.) But to care for this brood, Apu came up with a handy vest containing eight baby bottles to feed them all, as a mother pug would suckle her puppies. Perhaps Nadya Suleman could contact Springfield’s newsman extraordinaire Kent Brockman for her next interview, and meet Apu at his Kwik-E-Mart to pick up a bottle vest of her own.

• Otto Octavius, aka “Dr. Octopus” is one of Spiderman’s arch-nemeses. His four mind-controlled mechanical arms became fused to his body in a freak laboratory accident involving his radioactive research. The transformation spawned a turn towards criminality, with “Doc Oc” using his arms to pry open bank vaults and squash meddling police officers. I suggest Nadya Suleman contact The Daily Bugle, the newspaper edited by Peter Parker/Spiderman’s boss, J. Jonah Jameson. Perhaps an interview with them could attract the attention of Doc Oc, whose own arms, in concert with his metal pincers, could change one Suleman kid while feeding another a cookie.

• The Octodog is what you get when you use a “Frankfurter Converter,” a simple kitchen product available online. This $16.95 device slices the lower half of a hot dog, making it into an octopus (see above). The octodog clearly is meant to encourage kids to play with their food, and is just so silly, the plastic cutters have been featured in magazines and on TV, including Rachael Ray. Even though Nadya Suleman claims to not know much about the world of celebrities, I suspect she may be drawn to something that’s gotten so much press. The Frankfurter Converter would certainly be a help to an octomom, with so many mouths to feed.

I hope the octomom does okay for herself and her kids. After all, they didn’t ask to be born to such a person in such strange circumstances. I’m eager for her star to fade, I just hope it doesn’t happen because someone else becomes a duodecimom (12 kids). I don’t think there’s enough room on Apu’s vest for that many baby bottles.

- Jacktastic

V-Day

Well, Valentine's Day is more of a chocolate holiday than a cookie holiday.

For this reason, CMonster blog is on hiatus this week. This has NOTHING to do with the absence of a post.

xoxo,

Lisa

In Defense of Self-Indulgence

Friday again? Already? Seriously?

As I write, I am consciously adrift amidst a pervasive social fad - it's like Lance Armstrong yellow bracelets and business people talking about "synergy." Every time you turn around, there it is. I've read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and I know all about how some ideas/phenomena are "sticky" and take off once the right people endorse them. Ask Gladwell, fads, like germy epidemics, spread.

The fad in question is the "25 Things You Don't Know About Me" lists that have saturated Facebook in-boxes and consumed, according to Time, at least 800,000 hours of America's time (to write the lists) and easily more reading them. This article bashes the lists, labeling them a self-indulgent, useless exercise in over-sharing. Based on simple arithmetic, the article claims that over 125 million facts have been shared in the process and to a pointless end. Unarguably, this fad has long surpassed the tipping point and landed clear on the other side. The "25 Things" is the bubonic plague of social fads.

Let's dig deeper and think about why.

What's neat about self-disclosure is that when one person reveals an intimate detail about themselves, a respondent is triggered to respond with similarly telling fact. Remember the last time a relative stranger or a casual colleague divulged a personal tidbit? He tells you that he had lost a parent to a particularly painful battle with cancer; she had struggled with depression or substance abuse; or his relationship had hit a particularly rocky patch. What do you do?

My guess is that you do one of two things. A) You usually respond with empathy, state "I've been there," and cite a relevant personal experience. Or, B) Even if you can't relate to exactly what the person said, you mention, "I've had my struggles too" and reveal a telling anecdote. These lists spark that innate human reciprocity of sharing information.

Sitting down to write the list might not be the ego-stroking exercise in self-love Time accuses it of being - it could be guilt. The guilt that comes from knowing that your friends have taken the time and care and thought to put themselves out there and you've consumed it without lobbing back a volley.

Considering that when you post your list, you are suppose to "tag" 25 other virtual friends and invite them to share their own list openly acknowledges that peer pressure plays a role in perpetuating the trend. But given that people love to talk about themselves, how much prodding does it really take? We'll never know for sure, but would the lists have taken off with the tagging?

Even if it is self-indulgent practice, a fact I don't wholly dispute, the voyeur in me has taken great pleasure in the lists. As soon as someone posts one, I feel magnetically compelled to read it. I might even re-read it later in the day. One of the more interesting things about social networks, online activities, and blogs is that they play an important role in how we create and express our identities. We make choices to reveal certain personal (private) facts on the assumption that readers assemble interpretations thusly.

When teaching an introductory course on Interpersonal Communication a few years back, I spent some time discussing identity and where it comes from. One's public identity is a construction. Who you are, in part, extends from who you say you are. On one level, these lists codify the process of individuals taking an active role and controlling how they are viewed. For me, it's curious to see what kinds of facts people choose to include or exclude (lots of memories about the glory days?), what they deem important enough to say (is it deep stuff or favorite ice flavors and colors), and what they are oddly compelled to share (any TMI moments?).

But from these lists I am actually learning things. I've discovered many unexpected parallels that have further linked me to my friends. These are quirky little things that we have in common and that might have long remained discovered. The lists beg for comments, serve as invitations to rehash old memories, and vehicles to snigger about inside jokes. They act as conversation starters. While they begin as one-sided personal statements, they quickly morph into dialogues.

There's an unspoken irony about this kind of meta-blogging about self-disclosure and the impulse to share. I feel guilty reading the blogs of social acquaintances when they don't know I read the blog. I mean, you write a blog, you put it out there, you expect readers. There's less anxiety for me if I am reading the blog of a stranger. I've never successfully crossed the line and express my dedication, near obsession, or interest in their lives - for fear of coming across as a stalker or having a perverse curiosity for people/things I shouldn't. A perk about the list is that it's an acknowledged forum for revealing the secrets of selfhood.

So, are the lists bringing people together or fixing the nation's problems? Probably not, or not in any significant way. But I think that the popularity of the lists can be attributed to our desires to be known in ways we devise and construct these mediated self-identities. It's a collective process. The writer needs to put it out there for the reader to stitch together. Us bloggers have been engaged in this work for years, in some cases. The rest of the world is just catching up, 25 facts at a time.

Addendum: Apparently writing about the 25 Things list IS the new 25 things list, according to Gawker.