City born into this world with no knowledge and no regrets

I have a natural knack for planning. While I don't think of myself as the "planner" type when it comes to personalities (which in my mind conjures up an image of the tightly-wound, pencil-skirt-wearing killjoy who falls to pieces when someone steals her day planner), I seemingly always automatically know exactly what I'll be doing next. When new information, opportunities, or possibilities present themselves, I absorb them and rather quickly reorient myself to whatever prospective direction seems most fitting. As a result, I don't usually spend very much of my day in the anal-retentive throes of plan-making; my plans are always just there.

It's easy to get irritatingly self-congratulatory about such an ability. Others may compliment you on the fact that you seem to always know where you're going, cosmically speaking, and you may think to yourself, "Why, it seems that I do possess a superhuman ability; perhaps I should locate Stan Lee to alert him of my existence," and it's easy to forget that luck and luxury have a lot to do with it.

Right now, for the first time in my life, I have absolutely no idea where I'll be or what I'll be doing over the next year, and for the moment the answers to those questions are beyond my control. As I am a Person With Perpetual Plans, lacking the answers to the basic 5 W's of my life leaves me feeling uncomfortable in my own skin much of the time.

Nevertheless, I will consign to carrying on with my annual blog-tacular New Years predictions game:*

Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2010:
- I'll officially receive my research honors and will walk in IWU's May commencement.
- I (along with Sarah, Garrett, Alex, and Miranda) will move to Chicago, probably in August or September, in order to live with my seester and to provide GR with a new backdrop for hugs.
- I'll send out applications for English PhD programs for, ahem, Fall 2011.
- Megan and Brian will get married, and I'm guessing 1-4 other people I know will get engaged.
- I'll become passably adept at speaking, and hopefully reading, Spanish

How Prescient I Actually Was for 2010:
- Check.
- Alex didn't move to Chicago, but the rest of us did, with August as my first month's lease to boot. My implicit prediction that GR and I would still be together came through, too.
- Check.
- Check, although only barely with the latter half. My step-brother got engaged, but I think he's the only person I know who did. I'm not friends with the early-marrying kind, I guess.
- Fail. Epic fail. Languages are hard, man.

Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2011:
- By April, I will be working for a different company than the one I do now.
- I will visit a state that I have previously never been to.
- My parents, sister, and GR will patiently help me make a series of agonizing decisions over the course of the year.
- My student loans will finally be consolidated successfully.
- By the end of the year, I will become a better cook and expand my culinary skills beyond the rudimentary meals I make now, perhaps even learning to wield spices.
- I will attend at least two (2) weddings.



* While I don't believe in karma or jinxes, I don't not believe in them, either, so I'm making the executive decision to abstain from any predictions about the results of my grad school applications.

I laugh when they tell me to find myself. (Because when you're looking for yourself, who do you ask for help?)

As the Batman comics have reliably reminded us, two-facedness is not considered an admirable quality among humans. Or at the very least, people don't like it. Your friends and family will generally become bothered if they discover that there are aspects of your personality about which they were unaware. (Unless, of course, those aspects are actually positive things, like someone who covertly scrubs oil off baby seals in his spare time. Although in this case, instead of anger, you risk people reacting with uncomfortable confusion about why your now-seemingly-suspicious seal-love was kept under wraps.)

As someone who, for most of her life, tried with varying degrees of enthusiasm to win the World's Goodiest Two-Shoes award, I've made it one of my many goals in life to be a consistent person, to always present more or less the same Linda to all the Not-Lindas I meet. And I've never really thought it to be a difficult goal to maintain. I tend to be honest with everyone, given that I've rarely seen the logic or value in lying, and my personality is laughably unobjectionable, meaning that I practically never need to censor myself. I don't even have to pretend to have a cleaner mouth in front of elderly relatives or dignified guests, because swearing isn't part of my vernacular, anyway.

Flanders-esque as I may be, I still acknowledge the fact that its outright impossible to be the exact same person everywhere. Human behavior is highly predicated on the behavior of surrounding humans. Try as he might, if you drop a man in a room full of 20 flighty cast members from The Real Housewives of Orange Country, you will see a slightly different person emerge than if you dropped the same man in on a physics lecture. As Virginia Woolf put it: "it depends so much upon the room." Context-dependent behavior is also, frankly, practical. If everyone were the same person at work as they are on a night out with friends, many would get fired on the spot.

Despite this, I'm left wondering if this Fundamental Truth of Human Interactions is in the process of changing, thanks to The Internet. Recently, I attended a business marketing meeting in which the speaker vehemently promoted using every resource available (from Facebook to Twitter to blogs to your actual life) to create, shape, and promote your "personal brand"--the professional version of "you" that you want your employers and clients to see. He emphasized that it is essential that you present the same, business-ready, squeaky-clean version of yourself at all times.

Even more recently, a round of Wikileaks was released in which U.S. diplomats were quoted as being irreverently frank in their personal conversations about other political leaders. While there are many people who oppose Wikileaks, there are many others who feel justified and comfortable with having this information distributed, presumably because people are supposed to be consistent. These diplomats, they might argue, shouldn't say anything if it isn't suitable for worldwide ears.

Personally, this trend disturbs me. I'm a person who considers consistency a personal credo, and even I feel uncomfortable with the suggestion that I absolutely have to be the exact same person on Facebook, at work, with friends, and on my blog. While I haven't decided where my opinion falls about Wikileaks at large, I do know that I believe that diplomats need to be able to have honest, private conversations with their peers back home. I'm uncomfortable with the fact members of the media and public are actually against this.

As a well-homogenized Linda to all Not-Lindas, I know as well as anyone that there is freedom in consistency. I am comfortable with myself, and I am comfortable being myself, generally, in front of any new face I meet. The second that this consistency becomes a requirement, however--a rigid, inflexible standard that comes with penalties for contextual deviation--the freedom is instantly gone.

At this point, one can argue that this standard of superhuman consistency is only expected of politicians, so it's not a real or pressing concern for plain ol' folks such as myself. Still, I think Orwell would raise an eyebrow.

There comes a time when you fade into the blackness

Now that I'm An Adult, I have a lot of daily rituals. My alarm goes off at 5:25 a.m. and I hit the snooze button on 5-minute increments until I get up at 5:35. I go to the gym directly after work, spend 30-50 minutes on an elliptical or treadmill, consider doing a few weight exercises, don't, and leave. Tuesdays are House. Every day is cereal.

I've also begun listening to Eric and Kathy's morning radio show on 101.9 (THE MIX!) during my drive to work. Unfortunately, since I don't have cable or even basic television, the short, culture-heavy news blurb on their show is often the only taste of "news" that I get (save for when I start to feel guilty about my uninformedness and browse the BBC website, which happens every fourth day or so). My perspective on "news" gets understandably distorted, considering today's E&K news segment spent 5 seconds on the election results and 30 on the fact that Chicago Bulls' player Derrick Rose stood up the cast of The Good Wife, leaving a show crew member knocking on the door of his empty house, fruitlessly expecting to put him on a plane to go film a cameo appearance in an episode.

But occasionally some of their pop-news interests me. The other day, the studio was in a brief tizzy over the post that a prominent blogger (I find it hilarious that those two words actually belong together) from Marie Claire magazine made about the new TV show Mike & Molly, a pretty generic sitcom about a married couple. The story apparently made national news as well. The Marie Claire blogger wrote that watching two "fatties" with "rolls and rolls of fat" kiss or "do anything else" onscreen grossed her out (the title characters are, as you probably surmised, overweight).

I was more than anything intrigued by the response that this blog generated with the media and laypeople, squishy and beanpole alike. Rightfully so, most people were outraged by the writer's insensitivity, eventually eliciting a long, plaintive, sorrowful retraction from the writer. Critics accused her of being a bully, unfair, disrespectful, judgmental, sizist (oh yes, there's an -ist for everything), and a slew of other things she generally deserved.

While I agree that the blogger's comments were offensive, as far as hatemongers go, the Marie Claire blogger is more in the ranks of Scrooge than Stalin. She starts her post in an indignant tirade of off-putting insensitivity, but then backpedals from her own position. She concedes that losing weight is extremely difficult, that there are psychological factors involved, and that the show doesn't promote being obese or anything. While she clearly leans towards an opinion that would offend most people over a size zero, she leaves room for argument and self-criticism, ending her post with "...I don't know."

Given that the blogger isn't exactly the most vehement of bigots, what I find so intriguing is that this--this show, this issue--is what caught the bloodshot, crazed eye of the media. I later heard about it on three different news shows. I suppose I'm pleasantly surprised that The Public is capable of getting riled up on behalf of others, but that surprise comes from the fact that there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of TV shows and movies out there that are either offensive in of themselves or prompt others to make derogatory comments. When South Park made a joke out of depicting Muhammad, many people acted like it was an overreaction when anyone got offended about it (granted, the terrorism threat didn't help the case of anyone who might've been legitimately put off). Why is it only sometimes cool or attention-worthy to be justifiably offended?

I guess what I'm trying to say is: let's spread the hate around, guys.

Now you can be anything, anything you want

I'm going to go ahead and play media junkie for another week.

Back in the middle of this summer I was sitting in a dark, popcorn-fragrant theater in Glenview, watching the final few obligatory movie previews shown before Inception. This moment in time was neither particularly extraordinary nor noteworthy, save for the following two things: 1) Being both loquacious and a miser, I can't normally justify spending $8 for the social privilege of sitting silently beside my friends when I can just as easily pay $2 to chat with them over coffee, so I enter movie theaters roughly two times per year, making any silver screen-viewing time memorable, and 2) It was on this evening that I saw the preview for The Social Network.

After getting over my skepticism that Justin Timberlake was actually cast in a major role in a high-profile movie (had he really managed to destroy every copy of the made-for-TV Disney movie Model Behavior?), I was overwhelmed with a second wave of disbelief that a serious, historical-dramatic movie was actually being made about something that occurred in 2004. Further, I had a hard time believing that the viewing public would be terribly interested in being regaled with the legal and professional drama of a 20-year-old Harvard nerd-turned-billionaire. If they were, isn't a Bill Gates movie long overdue?

Clearly, I was of the minority opinion. The Social Network is currently the #1 movie in America and has a 97% rating on rottentomatoes.com.

I don't plan on seeing the movie, in part out of sheer indignation over how popular it has become. Mostly, though, I'm avoiding it because I'm a little disturbed by how much glee the general public seems to be taking in the cold, almost-villainous portrayal of Zuckerburg in the film, as well as the pervading indifference to the fact that this portrait is, by most accounts, not particularly accurate. For example, Slate magazine writer Nathan Heller (who happened to knew Zuckerburg as an acquaintance at Harvard) relates the following:

"Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg is a withdrawn, wounded recluse who spirals across campus with his head locked down, answering questions in a quick, high-strung rodent voice. The Zuckerberg I knew [...] was outwardly friendly, often smiling, confident, inclined, if anything, to talk at outdoor volume. He was something of a geek, I guess, but at Harvard in 2002, this was not exactly a minority position."

and later:

"Eisenberg's portrait of an oppressed, psychologically wounded mogul fits [our] cinematic universe better than the real Zuckerberg would, and, anyway, it's beside the point to fuss over the nitty-gritty of the movie's accuracy: The Social Network is openly built according to the laws of narrative fiction, not documentary."

Basically, the movie-makers knowingly distorted the story of Facebook's creation in order to fit the story that they thought moviegoers would want to see. I know: insert gasp of shock. Putting a spin on reality is sort of what movie-making is all about. Plus, this film was partially the brainchild of Aaron Sorkin, the man who painted perhaps the most distorted and idealistic portrait of American politics ever in The West Wing, so a misrepresentation is even less surprising.

Still, in the same way that I have a fundamental objection to Bones, The Social Network bothers me in its blatant disregard for factual accuracy in its characters.

For one thing, Zuckerburg (the real man) is still young, still in business, and still very close to the events portrayed in the movie. Other noteworthy historical figures and groups have been subject to similar in-the-moment scrutiny, of course: All the President's Men came out within a decade of Watergate... but at that point, Nixon was roundly perceived as a sweaty, awkward ne'er-do-well. And a slew of movies about Nazi Germany came out the instant the U.S. became involved in WWII... but the Nazis were already well on their way to solidifying their generally agreed-upon status as the #1 international arch nemesis of all time.

Zuckerburg, on the other hand, is not an obviously villainous guy. He helped to create a website that most of us consider invaluable today, and may or may not have done some douchey things along the way. To me, his legacy is overall positive, and his business troubles seem pretty run-of-the-mill rather than dastardly; I don't respect or understand the effort to make him out to be a creepy scoundrel. The fact that he's a billionaire doesn't make me feel any less sorry for the fact that he is now undergoing more or less international defamation, and for no real reason.

Similarly, I don't buy the argument that the filmmakers were solely striving for some sort of higher artistic purpose that transcends technical accuracy. One critic argues, The Social Network is "a major American story and an important cautionary tale" about 21st century cutthroat personalities and modern modes of betrayal. It's not about whether or not the story is true; it's about capturing the sinister quality that secretly underlies our flashy social media culture.

This interpretation might very well be valid, but it reads like an excuse. As I noted just a few weeks ago, over the last year or so certain groups have been growing dissatisfied with Zuckerburg's apparent lack of concern for Facebook members' privacy. Zuckerburg, who previously was hailed as a genius of communication and forward-thinking, was suddenly cast into a suspicious light. To me, it seems awfully coincidental that this high-concept artistic film happened to hit the box office soon after Zuckerburg's privacy issues made headlines. And as for the filmmakers' assertion that their account is obviously fictional--yeah, right. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with pop culture knows that many viewers are absorbing The Social Network as the Tale of The Real Zuckerburg. Maybe the filmmakers hoped that they would offer a catharsis for such viewers: "Take that, Zuckerburg! How does it feel to have your privacy invaded, Mr. Moneybags?"

It's not that I think The Social Network had some sort of wide-scale conspiratorial agenda to turn the world against Mark Zuckerburg, nor am I trying to argue that Zuckerburg is some sort of blameless saint. I do, however, doubt that the filmmakers could say, "The Social Network was made with due respect and fairness to Mark Zuckerburg and did not intend to prey on our cultural disdain for billionaires" without their well-pressed trousers catching aflame.

It's a story as common as a penny, son

While not possessing cable TV, my sister and I manage to maintain obsessions with certain television programs. Aside from our common crack-like addiction to Gilmore Girls, my weakness is House, and for a while Cathi's was Bones. For those of you who, for whatever reason, don't make a habit of familiarizing yourselves with every mildly interesting criminal investigation drama that hits primetime, Bones is a show about a forensic anthropologist named Temperance "Bones" Brennan who, with the help of her male detective friend Booth and a team of ludicrously competent forensic specialists, solves murders.

Following the footsteps of every forensics-focused show since CSI, Bones takes obvious pains to differentiate itself from CSI by including a wacky twist to the premise. (For peer review, see NCIS [CSI, but with marines!], Numb3rs [CSI, but with math!], and The Mentalist [CSI, but with a super hot perceptive guy!]) In Bones, the twist is Bones herself. Bones, as a character, is logically and empirically-minded to the point that she seems autistic at times. She fails to pick up on emotional cues, vocally discards concepts like love and religion as chemical imbalances and delusion, and generally makes everyone uncomfortable with her bluntness and lack of regard for social norms. But she's a woman. Watch as the freak emotionless women awkwardly receives a hug, and then solves a crime. Riveting!

Clearly, I object to Bones for this reason. It offends my sensibilities and validates my disgust for media culture that the concept of a preeminently logical woman is so mystifying as to make a viable premise for a television show. Plus, any good feminist would note that while Bones is so socially and culturally incompetent as to fail to recognize a reference to American Idol or understand why a fed and changed baby may still cry, she manages to adroitly wield eyeliner and put together a form-flattering outfit for each episode.

Still, after having watched a few episodes (because though I morally oppose the show's premise, I am nothing if not a hopeless crime drama junkie), I can't say I dislike it, and I actually find myself relating to Bones' character. She is not a sexualized being. There is an emphasis on her intelligence and problem-solving abilities. She, too, disdains cultural norms. Frankly, as a young lady possessing stunted emotionality by most conventional female standards, I take pleasure in finally seeing this quality of myself represented in the media.

It's necessarily a love-hate relationship. Bones features the only leading female that I've found on television who possesses a general tenor of analytical-mindedness that I can relate to, but she's still more a gimmick than anything. On one hand, sometimes there are lines like this:

Bones: People have done much worse for beauty - neck stretching, foot binding...
Booth: Okay, you're saying that makes it okay?
Bones: Of course not. Any major alteration of our underlying architecture demeans us.

On the other hand, there are lines like this:

Booth: Why don't you go mingle?
Bones: Why?
Booth: Because you're a girl.

I think I'll have to call it a wash for feminism.