Every penny that I pass says I should either leave or pick it up

2012 was a pleasant year for me, if only because it was (unlike the previous few) a year of overwhelming stability and predictability, which appeases the better Millhouses of my nature. This year, for the first time since 2005, I didn't have to move/switch apartments; I continued to trundle along a career trajectory that will keep my life and movements delightfully regulated for at least the next three years; and I kicked off Relationship Year Four with a boy who has yet to give any indication that he's getting sick of me. So, before I launch into my annual blogtacular New Years predictions game, I'd like to give 2012 a shout-out and a hearty imaginary clap on the back for being, at least in Lindaland, an admirably good egg of a year. High fives all around.

Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2012:
- I'll agonize over whether or not to move apartments or renew my lease in my current one, but will ultimately decide to stick with my current pad.
- I will schedule, take, and successfully get through my minor field exam.
- At least two of my friends (not including GR) will come visit me in Boston.
- I'll keep my current part-time/remote job for the duration of the year.
- I will be surprised by at least one person I know announcing that she is pregnant.
- I will go see a movie in theaters less than two times over the course of the entire year.

How Prescient I Actually Was:
- Yep, as noted above. To be honest, though, I didn't do that much "agonizing." Inertia and moving-fatigue basically made the decision for me.
- Success! My minor exam, stressful though it was, is now a couple months behind me, munching on my dust.
- 75% success, since I'm not counting family members. Ellyn came to visit me, and I met Zach downtown while he was passing through Boston over the summer.
- Truth. I will cling to my job like a sloth to a tree branch for as long as I can.
- Two of my old high-school acquaintences, to my surprise, are currently pregnant.
- Truth. I saw The Dark Knight Rises back in July, but otherwise didn't find myself in a movie theater for the rest of the year.


Bonus List of Significant 2012 Events I Didn't Predict, Either Due to My Own Lack of Foresight or Their Total Unexpectedness:
- My sister's engagement and marriage
- Obama's re-election
- That worries about the so-called Mayan Apocalypse would actually become a Thing
- The Backstreet Boys [re-]reunion
- A surprising number of divorces among people I know
- My How I Met Your Mother fandom
- That I would find myself thinking, "Jeez, another shooting massacre?" seemingly every two weeks


Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2013:
- GR and I will move into a two-bedroom apartment somewhere along the D-line, and will find the transition into cohabitation to be relatively smooth, even if the move itself is a little stressful.
- I will attend fewer weddings than I did in 2012 (during which I attended three), and I will not be in any bridal parties.
- I will travel outside of the U.S. more than once. Canada and Mexico totally count toward this tally.
- I will find that I enjoy teaching.
- I will make at least one really large/significant purchase (e.g., a car, furniture, a major appliance)
- GR will teach me how to drive manual transmission cars.
- My current cell phone will finally give out, forcing me to join the 21st century and get a smart phone. Still, I will not buy an iPhone. 

No one's gonna write me my songs

Most of us, in our high school English classes, were taught to think of the novels and poems we read as perfectly crafted, self-contained works of art. We can all probably remember sitting sleepily at our desks, hunched over a borrowed copy of Fahrenheit 451, listening to a well-meaning teacher point out the repeating themes, symbolic images, and perfectly constructed sentences in the novel -- all the literary elements that work together to produce the meaning or significance that explains why Ray Bradbury bothered to write the book (something about censorship, right?). Once the class, fumblingly and in unison, agreed on what the author's intent was based on those literary devices, everyone was satisfied and you could move on to the next book. Occasionally a disgruntled student would wonder aloud about how we could possibly know what Shakespeare or Dickens truly intended, seeing as famous authors are usually dead and from a different century, but such objections were usually silenced quickly because, after all, works of literature are pristine and perfect artifacts, and must be appreciated as such. Our job is simply to acquire the skills that allow us to stand back, admire, and understand the genius of the art.

There's something strange about this approach to English education, and the strangeness is apparent to anyone who has ever read and genuinely liked a novel; namely, that these high school classes didn't always or even often shed light on how books make us feel -- which (if it's a good book) is often a roller coaster of emotional turbulence. For example: why do all American teenagers, after reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower, feel like the scope of their existence can be expressed by the phrase, "I feel infinite"? How is it possible that even thinking about Dolores Umbridge's tenure at Hogwarts makes people feel legitimately upset? Why does everyone feel like they have a better sense of what's depressing about the world after reading a Vonnegut novel? There's something magical about novels, in the very fact that they can do these things, and this magic isn't usually satisfactorily explained by simply pointing out a whole bunch of literary devices. For this reason, a lot of people leave their English classes feeling like there's a vertiginous gap that exists between what they actually like about novels, and what they were told in school about why those novels were good.

It's only when you get to advanced levels of education on English literature -- the higher-altitude realm of 300-level college or graduate classes -- that you learn how to start to close that gap and unravel the mystery in a coherent way. A lot of English academics actually spend a good deal of their careers exploring the magic of literature, coming up with theories for why and how we find novels or poems so emotionally resonant and intellectually stimulating. You stop thinking about books as dusty time capsules and start treating them like living organisms, capable of evolving over time and responding in interesting ways when you poke and prod at them. Rather than pretending like there's a list of unchanging symbols and themes that automatically explain why a novel is good, you keep asking new and different questions, in the service of helping you understand why actual, fleshy human beings have strong responses to an author's words. Over time, you start to get real answers (or at least some pretty cool hypotheses) to the question of why certain books make you feel feelings so feelingly.

To illustrate, here's one hypothesis that I find particularly nifty: 

When it comes to novels, we tend to imagine that the author has given us this closed package, containing a fully mapped-out, detailed world, populated with fully developed characters waiting to perform for us. In reality, though, technically, novels don't make sense purely on their own. When you read To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, did Harper Lee have to tell you that Scout sleeps at night and is awake during the day, or that she needs to eat and drink water in order to stay alive? No -- those details are true for pretty much all humans, and there's no need to talk about it. And when you think about it, there are actually a whole lot of details about the "world of the novel" that the author never has to tell us, because Lee assumes that we already have certain pieces of knowledge. This includes even large, cultural concepts that are central to the plot. Once Lee tells us that the setting is in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1920s, she doesn't need to describe every detail of institutionalized racism against African Americans, because she assumes that we'll fill in that information ourselves. When you picture the courtroom where Finch defends Tom Robinson, Lee doesn't have to tell you exactly what the courtroom looks like, because you rely on visual memories of courtrooms that you've seen in the past to construct your mental picture of the setting.

How does this help illuminate the magic power of books? Well, when you read a novel, you're not just passively accepting a literary world that the author has constructed for you. The world that Lee wrote down in the text is profoundly unfinished. As you read, you become an active participant, building the world of the novel in your mind with the help of Harper Lee, using your own thoughts and memories. You're the one who gives Scout and Atticus their visible faces and bodies, and you imaginatively send them gamboling through settings that you've mentally sketched out. Your own, personalized brain is so deeply implicated in the act of reading, you almost have no choice but to get cognitively and emotionally involved. Logically, the more time and effort you put into imagining and enlivening the world of a novel, the more emotionally invested you're going to get. It's interesting to think about how authors might be manipulating their readers' minds, memories, and experiences in order to achieve certain mental or emotional effects.

That's the gist of one theory that explains literature's awesomeness, anyway. There are plenty of others.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that our current method of teaching high-school English classes is wrongheaded or useless. Theories like the one I just described involve a substantial amount of nuance and textual support and research that I completely glossed over in my summary -- at the core of any interesting literary theory, you tend to find the basic principles of formal literary analysis that also lie at the core of the high school English curriculum. No one expects you to be able to do calculus before you've learned algebra, and while literary studies are a different animal, it, too, is a discipline with different kinds of expertise: what you learn in middle school and high school are the basic tools and skills for literary analysis that allow you to do more interesting stuff with literature later on.

What's sad, simply, is that many -- and perhaps the majority -- of people never get past "the basics" of their literary education. They stop taking English classes before they get to the ones that show you how to bridge the relevancy gap and use your high school tools to figure out how literature can matter to our minds and lives. Too many people remain under the terribly ironic impression that English classes can't help them understand what's really special about literature.

Also, consequently, there are a whole lot of people who don't really have any idea what I do with my time when I tell them that I'm in an English grad program. Hopefully this blog has made it a little clearer.

P.S. You know that part where I talked about how our brains and memories are implicated in reading? It comes from a whole area of literary analysis called cognitive narratology, and if you think it's interesting, you should read Why We Read Fiction by Lisa Zunshine, and after that, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? by Blakey Vermeule.

All the color drains out of the frame

Attention, TIME Magazine! Yes, you! Let's huddle up for a second.

Look: I used to read Newsweek. And as it turned out, me reading Newsweek inevitably resulted in me writing the occasional, angry blog post criticizing their journalistic decisions. About a year ago, however, I subscribed to TIME, and -- although you deserve due congratulations for pulling in a new print subscriber in this Age of Internets -- you have consequently replaced your competitor as the easy target of my news-oriented scrutiny.

Thus far, though, you've had it pretty easy. I even defended you, several months ago, when Jon Stewart criticized you for running a cutesy Valentine's week cover in the U.S. the same week you ran a much more respectable-looking cover for your international markets. I generally enjoy reading your articles; I often learn things; and I always try to give you the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact that you keep letting Joel Stein write your pithy "Last Word" articles, even though he's not nearly as funny as he seems to think he is.

This week, per usual, I got my issue of TIME in the mail. The cover story is, "The Next Leader of the Unfree World: Why China's Xi Jinping will be the new President who really matters."
 

Looking at the glossy front page, I had a strange sensation of deja vu, as if I'd seen the exact same cover before. Lucky for me, I've taken to creepily hoarding all my back-issues of TIME rather than throwing them out, so I was able to quickly sift through every magazine I'd been sent over the last year to help me figure out why the cover seemed so familiar. It didn't take long for me to solve the mystery.

Weird, right? You use the exact same overexposed, Hell-themed cover style practically every time your cover story is about Asia or the Middle East!* Even more coincidentally, you only use this distinctive stylization technique when talking about China or the Arab Spring -- no other cover in the past year looks like this.

...Hold on -- that's not quite right. Actually, there were exactly two other issues over the last year that used a similar cover design strategy:

Here's the thing, TIME: I'm totally cool with it if you want to try and persuade me, with words, that merely thinking about China and the Middle East should engage my fight-or-flight response, as long as you do so in the clearly marked editorial and opinion sections of your magazine. There, mired in the usual hotbed of conflicting opinions, you can go ahead and let your fear-mongering prejudices fly, at which point I can evaluate your rhetoric and figure out whether or not you fit my Abnormal Psychology class's definition for clinical paranoia. But this? Subliminal messaging? You're better than that, TIME. Don't make me go and take my subscription money to to Atlantic Monthly.

*I say "practically every time" and not "every time" because your issue featuring the PM of Israel has a normal-colored portrait on the cover. Also, I'm deliberately excluding your "Escape from Syria" cover story as part of this list, because the story is more about the featured American photographer than it is about Syria/Syrians.

How long have you been sitting there?

Facebook is always in a tizzy about something, and lately (and predictably) the tizz is all about the presidential election. My newsfeed isn't a carbon-based life form, but if it were, I believe it would be gouging its eyes out right now out of angst over the never-ending cavalcade of opinionated posts and irate political blog-sharing -- posts which are often quickly followed with [perhaps even more annoying] "jeez guys stop being so political" responses.

As an online news junkie, I've been following all the hubbub with a certain amount of interest. But for all of its impassioned text-based screaming, little of it feels necessarily relevant to or directed towards me, seeing as I know whom I'm going to vote for. Obama has essentially had my vote in this election since mid-2008. I'm willing to say that, barring some sort of sci-fi-caliber mishap, literally nothing at this point is going to change my mind.

Perhaps that's a bad thing. Popular (not to mention well-researched) opinion these days holds that everyone in America really needs to take a step back and get a little less True Believer about their own political party. It's certainly a bad thing that many voters blindly idolize "their side," listening in to its well-spun rhetoric, while villainizng the other party without even a split-second of patient consideration for their points or worldview.

Yet, of course, as a well-educated 21st-century youngperson, I know this. I know I shouldn't be trigger-happy with my vote. As I'm digesting the 2012 presidential mediatizzy, the more confident I feel about my vote, the more self-critical I become. I know very well that I need to teach myself to doubt my impulsive allegiances and hatreds; if you're trying to be a Good Voter, there's a lot of pressure associated with being part of the political process. I'm told, by various Media Smartpersons from various sources, that to be a Good Voter, I must know the details of every policy of both candidates. I should know which policies are "the most important," and the debates surrounding how "importance" is decided. I must become familiar with how (and how often) each candidate spins or dodges questions about these policies, and what their euphemisms say, meta-textually, about both the candidates and their policies. I should get a sense for what the candidates are like as people, yet put that information in proper context with the more important issues. I should pay attention to how each candidate conducts himself overseas, yet not let the opinion of internationals affect my vote. Unless it should. I should not pay attention to minor gaffes, but I should probably pay attention to major ones. I need to learn what constitutes a major and a minor gaffe. I must be aware that various media outlets have different biases. I must know what these biases are and how to read through their rhetoric. During candidates' speeches, I should admire their charm and well-articulatedness, but I must let neither their charm nor their articulation get in the way of my ability to asses the information. Yet likability is also a factor, but, again, its importance must be put into proper perspective...

UGH! You know what, Media Smartpersons? I have other things I need to be doing with my time, and most of them don't involve reading about current and/or potential presidents. Like going to school. And writing blogs. And viewing the outdoors every once in a while. Your steep expectations are really making me feel like an inadequate citizen of the United States.

Lately, I've more and more frequently found myself wondering what votership was like in Lincoln's era -- or, say, how a Rutherford B. Hayes supporter felt walking into the voting booth. Surely voters in those halcyon, pre-technological, vehemently racist days had their own standards for what it meant to be a Good Voter, and they likely didn't involve memorizing every aspect of the candidates' foreign policies. We're in the Information Age now, and so we're by birthright obliged to sort through loads more information than an antebellum voter, but sorting through unlimited information remains a physical impossibility. We all have to draw the line somewhere, and while each of us will hopefully collect more information than a Hayes supporter in 1821, we all have to take seriously the idea that, after a certain point, enough is enough, and no more well-intentioned analysis is necessary.

For me, what finally curbed my political ulcer was one recent afternoon when, while on an elliptical at the gym, I thought about what I would want in my Ideal President. After all, I've read enough (not everything, but enough) about politics and government to have a sense of the various major issues and stances. If I could -- like a less-creepy and more-successful Dr. Frankenstein -- build my own POTUS, what would his/her priorities be while in office? I started mentally ticking off items on the list. (S)he would be a poised, well-spoken individual, who would spend his/her time in D.C. fighting for: strong early education, affordable higher education, support for the poor, rights for women/people of color/gays, bipartisanship, peacemaking, closing the wealth gap, protecting the environment, increased regulations in banking and finance...

It turns out that I know enough to know more or less what kind of candidate I would want to vote for, and -- guess what? -- Obama just happens to be pretty darn close to my ideal president. I felt that way in 2008. I still feel that way today. Mitt Romney is, ideal-proximity-wise... off in a field somewhere.  

The manic Internet bickerfest will rage on until election day, but my vote is settled -- and more importantly, I'm no longer going to feel anxious about it.

The taste of ink is getting old

Plagiarism is a funny thing. Like murder, it's an activity that, at a very young age, we understand to be hurtful and wrong. For anyone traipsing through standard K-12 schooling, as soon as you're old enough to write and use sources, plagiarism immediately becomes the most serious crime (and honestly, pretty much the only crime) that you can commit in the scholastic universe. Of course, unlike murder, it's possible to accidentally walk into plagiarism, seeing as the guidelines for what does and does not constitute proper sourcing can be confusing. (As a 24-year-old professional writingperson, I still sometimes get bogged down in the "do I need to cite facts?" quandary.)

The stakes -- at least while you're still in school -- are pretty high. Many, if not most, schools in the U.S. boast a "zero tolerance" policy when it comes to plagiarism: typically, it'll get you an automatic zero for the assignment; you might even flunk the entire class. For this reason, most schools have an explicit definition for what constitutes plagiarism, and it usually (and etymologically appropriately) boils down to "stolen words." For example, IWU's definition for plagiarism is: "the intentional or inadvertent misrepresentation as one’s own, the words, ideas, research data, formulae or artistic creations of another individual or collective body, without giving credit to the originator(s) of those words, ideas, data, formulae or artistic creations." Less loquaciously, my high school called it "9 or more consecutive words taken from another source without documentation."

Thanks to these kinds of policies, most of us come out of school with two major takeaways for how to be an honest writer: 1) stealing someone else's words is a really, really bad thing to do, and 2) plagiarism is a pretty black-and-white crime. Note the word inadvertent in IWU's policy. Copying is plagiarism, and if you do it, you're awful. End of story.

These takeaways are worth thinking about, particularly if you consider the fact that plagiarism scandals break out with some regularity in the Real World Media; it's an issue we run into well past high school and college. Do our school-taught sensibilities of what it means to be a moral/immoral writer serve us well when we confront grown-up scandals?

Recently, there were two different stories billed as "plagiarism stories" in the media, which is what got me interested in this whole issue:

Jonah Lehrer: A spunky, 31-year-old author and journalist known mostly for three popular pop-science books: Proust Was a Neuroscientist, How We Decide, and Imagine. He earned a bachelors from Columbia and was a Rhodes Scholar, after which he wrote for various publications before accepting a staff position at The New Yorker. A few weeks ago, he was accused of two different plagiarism-ish episodes: 1) he "self-plagiarized" material from some of his own blog posts, using it in "new" pieces for The New Yorker, and 2) he completely fabricated various quotes that he attributed to Bob Dylan in his book Imagine. After the charges came to light, Lehrer resigned from The New Yorker, but Wired magazine picked him up for their staff. More of his work is now being re-checked by publishers.

Fareed Zakaria: Highly respected author and journalist responsible for several books and for regular columns/segments for TIME, Newsweek, and CNN on politics, foreign affairs, and the economy. He earned a PhD from Harvard and has received various journalism awards throughout his career. A few weeks ago, it was discovered that a paragraph that Zakaria used in a TIME article (a paragraph that quoted a Constitutional Law professor on the history of gun control laws) had been lifted from another journalist. After suspending Zakaria and investigating the incident, both of Zakaria's employers (TIME and CNN) reinstated him, saying that Zakaria made an "unintentional error" and that it was an "isolated incident." While news of this scandal was breaking, Yale's school newspaper denounced him for the plagiarism, and so Zakaria resigned from his position as a board member at the university.

A close reader would notice the differences in these stories (fabricating vs. plagiarizing, a newbie vs. a veteran journalist, multiple vs. single infractions). But since they broke at around the same time and both involve writerly transgressions, many websites and news organizations discussed them both in the same breath -- they're both broadly understood as "plagiarism stories," and as such are treated as essentially equivalent, with both Lehrer and Zakaria deserving of being growled at for plagiarismy crimes. The New York Times was among the few who pointed out that, technically, Zakaria plagiarized while Lehrer is more accurately called a "fabulist." Having made this distinction, though, the writer, David Carr, is actually harder on Zakaria. Carr rebukes plagiarists for being "at bottom, lazy or sloppy" while he takes an almost empathetic stance towards Lehrer, who is young, struggling to shine as a writer in a competitive field, and is thus susceptible to fluffing up his work with lies.

That right there is the problem -- the reason why our secondary school plagiarism lessons are inadequate yardsticks for real-world scandals. Let's review the facts: Zakaria is an intensely intelligent and well-educated journalist who, after a spotless, decades-long career, has now been shown to be guilty for the first time of "unintentional" plagiarism. Lehrer is a popular writer who, even before this scandal broke, was criticized for publishing relatively ill-researched work, and has now been exposed for pulling quotes from Bob Dylan out of his ass. To add insult to injury, Lehrer squirmed around and lied for a while before fessing up to his wrongdoing. (Zakaria, for the record, took responsibility for his misstep right away.) The fact that these two incidents are being treated in the same way is annoying. That Zakaria's infraction is being branded as worse (presumably because it's plagiarism, which we're all taught to hate and fear, as opposed to Lehrer's harder-to-label crime) is absurd.*

I realize that there are, oh, probably two or three of us in the world who really get worked up about the amount of comparative disdain doled out to Lehrer and Zakaria, considering that both men are guilty of doing something wrong. But I'm going to go ahead and say it: If forced to choose, Lehrer deserves cultural Amish-style shunning way more than Zakaria does. If that isn't obvious, then it's a sign that we as a society need to be a bit more comprehensive when teaching our children what it means to be a trustworthy writer. Yes, plagiarism is very wrong, and it's important that we continue to scare kids away from it. But also I think it's important to send the message that "making crap up and calling it research" is an equally, if not worse, smarmy crime. 

Essentially, if a pair of stories like this one ever comes around again, I'd really like to see everyone cutting Mr. Decades-of-Honest-Journalism-Who-Made-A-Mistake a little more slack, and being substantially more critical of Mr. Obviously-On-His-Way-To-Being-Stephen-Glass.

* If someday it emerges that Fareed Zakaria actually is a lifelong plagiarist and has just been really, really good at hiding it for all of these years, then I'll eat my hat and retract this blog. But until that unlikely day...

Update: Wired magazine conducted an internal review of Lehrer's work (they hosted his blog, "Frontal Cortex," between July 2010 and June 2012) and found multiple instances of recycled work, plagiarism, fabrications, and/or factual inaccuracies. Wired has severed their professional relationship with Lehrer, and the journalist has now been pretty badly excoriated by at least one popular news/editorial site. Nothing new on Zakaria. It seems likely that I overreacted in the short term and that, in the long term, the media reaction is pretty appropriate to the crime(s).

Make copies, win races, stay with me, go places

Most people I know -- okay, everyone I know -- around my own age are computer-literate people. My generation, for the most part, has had access to computers since the day we were born, grew up with the Internet, and were weaned on its various privileges and dangers. We're savvy techno-users, to boot. We all used AOL, later mocked anyone with AOL once we discovered Internet Explorer, and then ditched IE for Firefox or Chrome. We all had MySpace pages, and then promptly deleted them, moved on to Facebook, and mocked anyone still on MySpace (musicians excepted). We're the people Baby Boomers talk about when they complain about the entitled, digitized generation, annoyingly and obliviously tapping on our smart phones. In fact, computer literacy is so pervasive among my peers that kids five- to ten years younger than us have already invented a new, crack-cocaine variety of technical proficiency in order to show us up. (How do teens manage to simultaneously check-in at and tweet about every single place they go, while sending 50 texts to seven different people, without falling into manholes?)

Because of our expertise and in-depth knowledge of the webz, pretty much everyone I know is aware of the fact that behavior on the Internet is governed by social rules. This seems obvious to us, despite the fact that back in the '90s, there was ongoing fear that the Internet would amount to nothing but a frightening, anarchic, hedonistic den of pedophilia and slash fiction, due to the fact that the World Wide Web doesn't require you to disclose your true identity. While it could be argued that some of those fears were/are justified, generally speaking, my generation has used the Internet as an extension of our grounded, real-world identities, rather than for Mr. Hyde alter egos. We recognize that practically everything we do "anonymously" online can, eventually, get traced back to our human bodies, and that's put the fear of God in the majority of us.

So anyway, the online world is implicitly governed by various social guidelines, similar to those you find in real life. And, like in the real world, most of them help you avoid soul-crushing social embarrassment and/or ostracization: Don't post anything you don't want others to read. Don't break up with someone with a text message. Don't openly brag on Twitter about spending the day rollerskating after you've called in sick to work. Think twice before posting that maudlin emo photo. In a plugged-in world, all of the above actions have a high probability of making you look like a doofus, and this is common knowledge.

For this reason, I find myself shocked and dismayed on the occasions when people my own age -- sometimes multiple people -- flagrantly break a rule that I believe to be one of the simple and finite Rules for Not Sucking on the Internet. We who have been Interneting most of our lives simply have no excuse for being ignorant of the Rules -- no more than we could honestly claim ignorance of how to negotiate a crosswalk. Peers on the Web: I expect better of you.

I'm only going to say this once.

Stop posting photos of your awful, gory injuries on Facebook.

Shame on you for needing me to tell you that. There are so many good reasons why I should never be obliged to view a slashed-up thigh or recently-operated-on kidney. Would you (compassionate, sane person that you are) ever consider printing out physical copies of your bloody, gangrenous wounds and forcing your friends to look at them? Of course not. Yet you, an expert Internet User, nevertheless persist in casually posting your retina-searing flagellation photos on Facebook, knowing damn well that they're going to show up on my news feed. Cut it out.

Are we understood? Okay then. Good day.

I said good day!

You taste so sweet, but I can't eat the same thing every day

There was a decently long period of time back in college -- a solid three or four semesters -- when I didn't watch any TV. Not in the stereotypical sense anyway, which entails setting aside time to deliberately watch a program on a regular or semi-regular basis, in an effort to stay invested in its characters and plot progression. There were two major reasons for my deprivation: one was the fact that, for a good chunk of my undergraduate career, I was otherwise busy being in school, working two to three jobs, maintaining relationships, and converting oxygen to carbon dioxide all at the same time. The other was my refusal to pay for cable TV at my apartments. Since at that point Hulu and Netflix instant-streaming were just getting off the ground, opting out of cable essentially doomed me to television illiteracy.

Pretty much everyone knows that "not owning/watching TV" tends to correspond with a super annoying attitude of intellectual superiority, thanks to the fact that we all grew up with at least one token non-TV-watching neighborhood family who modeled standard-issue snooty behavior. But if I felt any sense of pride related to my lack of TV-watching in college, it was because I saw it as a sign that I wasn't bored. If I hadn't constantly had things to do from eight a.m. to midnight, I knew that I'd probably be making hilariously complicated charts about Lost like everyone else.

Predictably, then, now that I find myself with a respectable amount of free time, I'm watching TV again. I spend anywhere between six and eight hours per day in class or (more often) with my nose in a book, so TV offers an ideal means of relaxation: it doesn't require intense concentration, and it allows me to relax my eyes looking at people and scenery rather than monolithic lines of print. Even better, since Netflix and (occasionally) Hulu let me start a series from the pilot and skip commercials along the way, I've been able to catch up on a surprisingly large number of shows from start to finish without becoming a constitutionally bleary-eyed screen-staring drone. An hour or two per day on average has managed to bring me up-to-date on The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Bones, and How I Met Your Mother. In my mind, instant streaming (or TiVo) has effectively eliminated the worst part of old-school TV -- the obligation of suffering through commercials or, even worse, horrible programming, simply because you wanted to distract yourself with something and there was nothing else on -- and replaced it with at-your-fingertips viewing autonomy.

In other words, while I admit to being a couch potato, I like to think that I'm at least thoughtful while I engage in my 'tatertude. So I was both amused and a little miffed by a Slate article I read recently, which urges everyone to stop "binge-watching" television shows.* Using a rhetoric that will be familiar to anyone who's been following the "video games are destroying the minds of our youth" news cycle, the columnist (Jim Pagels) writes that "TV binge-watching is a pandemic that has afflicted many of the nation’s college students," with "sites like SideReel, Netflix, and Megavideo" prompting teens to "plow through entire seasons in marathon sessions." 

* While I don't know that I've ever "binge-watched" a TV series at the level Pagels describes, watching an entire series in a single, solipsistic weekend, I think my tendency to concentrate on one series and watch two to four (depending on the length) episodes per day of that series fits within his definition.

Unlike most articles about video games, Pagels doesn't actually cite any statistics (or even any secondhand anecdotes) claiming that watching entire TV series' at unnatural speeds is detrimental to anyone's health or GPA. He even cites culture critics who promote concentrating on one TV show at a time. His beef, overall, is personal and qualitative. He argues that TV shows have a natural mode of pacing and distribution -- including individual episode cohesion, cliffhangers, and correspondences between the series' and real-life timetables -- and that defying the original presentation method defiles the medium. Recognizing that, despite his admonishments, people are still going to want to catch up on past seasons of programming, his recommendation is for everyone to "wait a minimum of 24 hours between episodes and at least a couple weeks between seasons" when watching a show, to help preserve the lost sense of longevity in a series, among other things. (Presumably, when reading Oliver Twist, Pagels would similarly advocate stopping and waiting a minimum of at least two weeks after every chapter, to emulate the monthly serialized publication of Dickens' novel.)

I'm a little ruffled that this Pagels guy thinks it's his business to comment on my TV-watching habits without having been prompted by any kind of actual evidence on the subject, but mostly I'm amused by his attitude. Pagels isn't upset because watching TV in marathon quantities is damaging the delicate gray matter of our nation's youth; he's worked up about the fact that binge-watching TV is an affront to the inherent integrity of the fine art of television viewing. Binging on TV, according to Pagels, cheapens the relationships we have with the storylines and particularly with the characters, who are intended (no joke, according to him) to feel like "our best friends." Apparently if you want to avoid TV-viewing-related snobbery, these days there's no place to hide.

Welcome to a new kind of tension

Today, through the combination blessing-and-curse that is Facebook link-sharing, I discovered a blog post, written by a random 20-something woman* on the topic of how 20-somethings are constantly yammering on about how "old" they are, a complaint that the blogger takes to be simultaneously understandable and absurd. While there are, as she points out, plenty of generally legitimate reasons why quarter-centenarians "feel old" (at least comparable to their happy-go-lucky, responsibility-ignorant, Mountain-Dew guzzling teenage selves), when it comes down to it, 20-somethings gripe about "feeling old" because we know darn well that we're actually enjoying the prime of our lives. We're furnished with the benefits and pleasures of a real adult life (e.g., independence, car rentals) with little-to-none of the soul-crushing adultish tidbits that too often accompany middle-age (e.g., high cholesterol, divorce). In the blogger's words, "We’re just the generational equivalent of the thin girl who goes on endlessly about how fat she is just to reaffirm that she is, in fact, quite svelte."

* I'm making a blatant, stereotyping assumption that the blogger is a woman, based on patently unfair but (let's face it) probably accurate textual and visual cues in the blog, such as the colorful background design and the fact that the blog is described as "A journey through: life, music, & pictures." 

I think the blogger's point is convincing, but I also have my own, slightly different hypothesis about the "whining 20s" phenomenon. The blogger takes the optimistic road when she blames the generational griping on youthful narcissism; in my mind, saying "I'm so old!" can just as easily be attributed to the impulse -- epidemic among my kin -- to deny that adulthood is happening. After all, using the phrase "old age" handily sidesteps the necessity of using the word adult. When you're busy concentrating on whether ending a night of barhopping at 12 a.m. rather than 2 makes you a wrinkly, decrepit old man ready to go home and don his Ebeneezer Scrooge nightcap and enjoy a glass of warm milk, you've skipped straight over adulthood, going directly from "peppy youngster" to "wheezy grandpa," creating an imagined world in which, as long as you're not said wheezy grandpa, you can still be considered young.

Speaking as an early- to mid-20 something, I can personally attest that it's straight-up hard for me to admit that I am (or will soon be) a full-fledged, no-holds-barred, unqualified, taxpaying adult. When TV personalities, journalists, or politicians refer to "the youth," I still automatically assume that they're talking about me. This knee-jerk impulse might actually be accurate for politicians (Wikipedia informs me that "the youth vote" generally refers to anyone 18-29), but there are other statisticians who place me dangerously close to not being "youth" anymore. According to the World Bank and the United Nations, my youth will expire in December of this year. According to the United States Department of Transportation, I already haven't been youth for three years.

Arbitrary age limits aside, functionally speaking, I am indeed an adult -- a young adult, but an adult nonetheless. And, even as a vivacious 24-year-old youngish person who still essentially has her entire life ahead of her, admitting adulthood is something that can be difficult to swallow without a slight twinge of "AHH! MORTALITY!" 

Diligent readers of my blog, at this point, would likely exclaim, "But Linda! You've professed to being an adult since before you turned 21! How can you possibly be reluctant to fess up to adulthood now?"**

** I'm impressed, surprised, and a little frightened by your studious readership and attention to detail, Diligent Reader.

I believe there's a difference between, on one hand, recognizing that your current life habits match the Adulthood Checklist ("I have a job, pay my own rent and bills, and cook for myself. I must be an adult!") and, on the other hand, recognizing that you no longer functionally fit into the category of the mosh pit-dwelling Youth. That latter realization is harder to come by. It's true that since 2008 I've been snottily patting myself on the back for checking off major points on the Adulthood Checklist ("I pay bills! Lookit me!") -- but even as I gloated, I still mentally retained my Youth Card. It was there, waiting for me, on the off chance I ever wanted to, say, move back into my parents' house, or spend an entire evening systematically categorizing/eating gummy bears while watching Boy Meets World on DVD.

Sometime in the last four years, though, Real Adulthood moved into my demographic and has been eying my Youth Card incredulously ever since. Renting an apartment, for example, is no longer a point of pride for people my age; it's expected for anyone not economically drained or emotionally crippled. Relatives are no longer surprised that my friends are getting married, but have started asking me sly questions about my own marital future. Hardly anyone I know wears t-shirts as their everyday dress anymore. Suddenly, and without warning, I've become embarrassed about the fact that, by any respectable measure, I can't cook.

It's a thing to be celebrated, really. So far, for the most part, being an adult kicks ass, whereas being a youth entailed a lot of friendship drama and severely unstable cash flow. But even if you think you're ready for it, being on the verge of relinquishing your Youth Card undeniably entails a paradigm shift -- and if the epidemic "I'm so old!" anthems are any indication, it's one that a lot of people my age are struggling with.

Incidentally, there are only 65 days until my sister's wedding. What a grandma!

Show 'em which side are you on now?

Last weekend, NATO leaders gathered in Chicago for one of their irregularly scheduled summits, and Chicagoland news stations nearly peed themselves with excitement. During the week or more of intense coverage of the event, grave broadcasters portentously speculated if, how, and to what extent the 1968 Democratic National Convention would be recapitulated during the summit, how the Chicago Police Department would manage the protesters and spectating crowds, and whether terrorizing threats would surface and, if so, how they would be handled. Occasionally some coverage of the content of the NATO talks would slip in.

When all was said and done after the weekend was over, newscasters were somewhat deflatingly forced to admit that the NATO summit went down more or less entirely as planned. The world leaders assembled, grumbled at each other for a while, and went home safely. The protesters assembled, rallied, and went home safely too (save for a riotous handful who presumably went home safely after temporary incarceration). As one Tribune article commented, "In the end, the summit proved a one-weekend blip on the radar of a major urban metropolis used to crowds, conventions, dignitaries and hoopla."

Consequently, in the absence of more interesting news, and from my non-involved and spectating vantage point, one of the most interesting outcomes of the whole NATO kerfuffle was the fact that it served as an interesting thermometer for peoples' gut-based political stances. Those generally distrustful of governments and/or the military had their allegiances revealed when they zeroed in on indications (whether real or imagined) of shady law enforcement practices or excessive use of police force. Those generally supportive of government leadership did a lot of sighing about the pointlessness, inappropriateness, and/or directionlessness of the protests.

My own reaction to the NATO summit is telling in that, overwhelmingly, my sympathies were with the CPD. While I generally had fluctuating reactions to both the NATO gathering and the protesters themselves, I was unwaveringly defensive of the police, who get problematically aligned de facto with NATO in the "summit vs. protesters" binary, but in reality more accurately simply represent The Rules. As a Tribune editorial commented, the [albeit seemingly excessive] police presence existed as part of their day-to-day "business of keeping the city safe." It's thus both unfair and unfortunate that officers get automatically mixed up in protesters' ire. Ideally a neutral force that respects the rights of both NATO and Occupy, CPD's job was to preserve "a place where world leaders could gather and citizens could assemble to speak their minds. If those citizens chose to taunt those assigned to protect them — by calling a police escort a 'pig on a horse,' for example — well, the officers would just have to look the other way." Seeing as the NATO protests in no way became an encore of the 1968 riots, the consensus is that the CPD executed their role effectively.

Overwhelmingly, I believe that what my loyalties expose about me is the fact that I am a Rule Follower -- which, given my presumptive goal of becoming the living embodiment of Milhouse, should come as a shock to no one. My instinctive sympathy with the police and my subsequent satisfaction with their success suggest that I trust in the wisdom of The Rules and believe in the rightness and efficacy of Rule enforcement.

Aside from contributing to my candidacy for a wedgie, my status as a Rule Follower interests me because I consistently get the distinct feeling that I'm in the minority. My gut impulse -- to trust first in The Rules and question or repel them when they prove themselves ineffective -- often feels somehow subversive against the perhaps more youthful attitude that rules are meant to be broken and The Establishment should be questioned until proven trustworthy. I personally don't tend to consider myself a mindless drone, unquestioningly abiding all rules and regulations bestowed from the governmental On High like mandates from HypnoToad, (after all, as an official member of the liberal arts ivory tower, I'm obliged to advocate critical thinking always and forever), and so I tend to be baffled by those who view The Establishment as a monolithic evil, who remain constitutionally contrary to anything that It has to say.

We can learn like trees how to bend

Things that I have learned during my first nine months in Boston:

 - How to spell Massachusetts.

 - That Massachusetts is a commonwealth. Referring to it as a "state" will, without particularly legitimate reason or warning, generate disdain from certain MASSdwellers. Thirty seconds of internet research informs me that, "Constitutionally speaking," states and commonwealths are identical; only four states (MA, KY, PA, and VA) consider themselves commonwealths, a designation that was historically borne out of a desire to distinguish territories that are "governed by the people" from those overseen by "some king or tyrant" -- like, presumably, those dirty, limey states. You have been warned.

 - That I belong in my grad program; at least to the extent that my professors and the members of my cohort do not seem to suspect (as I sometimes do) that my presence in the program is the product of some hilarious clerical mix-up.

 - That I don't know how to walk down steep hills without feeling like an awkward, lumbering marionette. The jury is still out on whether everyone feels this way, or whether my Midwestern upbringing handicapped me such that I will forever be inhibited from executing this task gracefully.

 - That hummus is cheaper in Boston. I don't know why.

 - That I thrive on solitude. This is more specifically something that I've always suspected of myself but for which I lacked empirical evidence. If absorbed in a project, I'm not bothered by the prospect (or the reality) of spending days on end with minimal face-to-face social contact. I realize that other people are prone to finding this trait alarming and/or a warning sign for some kind of personality disorder, but I figure that in time, my general lack of social ineptitude or murdering sprees will show the haters what's what.

 - That on a day-to-day basis, I eat no more or less seafood on the East Coast than I did living in the Midwest.

 - That learning in detail about the lives of famous writers -- such as Virginia Woolf, who over the course of her life published nine novels, four short story collections, two biographies, a play, and over 500 literary articles and essays, and in her free time read most canonical English literary and critical works, kept a diary, and maintained a surprisingly scandalous social life -- makes me sit and wonder what I'm really doing with my time.

 - That when you're an able-bodied young person and public transportation is adequate, it's very easy to exist without a car. Large, durable, reusable canvas bags are the key to less-laborious grocery shopping.

 - To feel comfortable walking on/over T tracks. This adjustment, while necessary in Boston, has made me (by my own calculations) 25% more likely to someday become one of those people in Chicago who stupidly trespass on the L tracks and thus hold up an entire line while they humiliatingly wait for assistance, lest they electrocute themselves during their attempt to make it to the other side.

 - That I will never, ever find a Cubs game on TV here. 

Boston is good people. Provided the 2012 Mayan apocalypse fails to come to pass despite the sheer force of nutjob willpower, I greatly look forward to the next four to five years.

It's an ache I still remember

[Randoms:]

This week, TIME released its annual "100 Most Influential People in the World" issue. Like the World Series, the issue's claim to represent "the World" should get a bit of an eye roll, since the list is comprised of people who are not only debatably influential but also overwhelmingly American, save for some obligatory nods to, say, Bengalese civil rights activists or Jamaican Prime Ministers. 

In fact, I refuse to believe that TIME truly regards its claim to "the World" unironically. What passes as influential in pretty much any category uses a blatantly American yardstick. Claire Danes, Kristin Wiig, Rhianna, Jeremy Lin, and Stephen Colbert all make the list, whereas essentially all non-Americans who make the cut are really significant political leaders or protesters, whose common qualification appears to be having been nearly assassinated on more than three occasions.

Still, I enjoy reading the list, mostly because it not only honors, but is largely authored by, major cultural icons. Johnny Depp writes the blurb on why Harvey Weinstein makes the list; Kathy Griffin writes on Chelsea Handler; Mia Hamm on Lionel Messi; Jeb Bush on Marco Rubio; Pink on Adele. (Some of the match-ups inevitably wind up reading like punchlines. The entry on Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is authored by Shakira.) Others are written by more run-of-the-mill TIME journalists like Fareed Zakaria or Joe Klein. 

Regardless of prestige, the blurb-author is credited in the same way for every entry, with a one-line bio familiar to all magazine articles (e.g., "Roubini is an American economist who teaches at New York University's Stern School of Business"). While I appreciate this nod to journalistic form, since so many of the blurb-authors are painfully famous, some of the mini-bios become hilarious instances of comedic understatement. (Compare the bio, "Lacayo is TIME's art critic" with, "Jolie is an actress and director" or, my favorite, "Obama is the President of the United States.")

 --- --- ---

I've become frustrated by the proliferation of "Forgive student loans!" petitions and advocacy groups that I've seen being hawked on my Facebook newsfeed. It's not that I don't empathize with the sentiment: I share a hatred for debt and an outrage that borders on disbelief regarding how much college tuition costs in the U.S. The higher-education system seems broken (or at least trudging along with a pretty ugly limp); it's unreasonable and deterring to ask students and their families to pay so much for college, essentially forcing them into monstrous debt, and it's bad for the economy (or so the Internet has told me) for so many of us to be burdened by tens of thousands of dollars in loans upon graduation.

Still: we signed contracts, guys. We accepted the offensively large price tags, asked Sallie Mae for the cash, and promised to pay back the amount that we borrowed. I know that not everyone went to college already prepared with a detailed loan spreadsheet and a multi-year money management plan. But I have to believe that most people (or at least the people I'm Facebook friends with) went to college with a ballpark figure of the debt they were taking on. If you have apoplectic sticker shock ("HOLY CRAP that's a lot of money why did I agree to pay that???") now that your loans have come to roost, it's a valid reason to petition for lower tuition rates, so that future generations won't have to suffer this insanity; but it's not reasonable justification for loan forgiveness.

--- --- ---

It's taken a while, but I think I've finally succeeded in not caring about music scenes. By "music scenes," I really mean "music snobs" -- those Big Brother musical judgment bureaus, epitomized by the A.V. Club, that constantly implicitly threaten to mock your music tastes (and therefore your soul) if you like the wrong thing. I originally fell into the trap, as I think we all do, as a teenager. At that point, trying to make it seem like your music tastes are unique and well-informed is practically a life-or-death priority. Liking a band in high school is a delicate social activity regulated by other people's opinions and disdain -- it's important to know what "type" of music you subscribe to, to disavow bands that have sold out or become too popular, and to either claim your prior knowledge or show a requisite level of guilt if you insist on continuing to enjoy overexposed groups. (Remember when we all had to stop liking Panic! At the Disco?)

Having spent the better part of ages 15-19 trying to silently convince myself that I really did listen to Green Day before they became mega-popular (fun fact: I didn't), at this point I'm willing to admit without blushing that I, like most people, am a bandwagoning music fan. When I discover an artist or song that I like, it's probably because they're in the process of becoming popular: I didn't know about Mumford & Sons until "Little Lion Man" started playing on the radio, I attended my first Tegan and Sara concert during their tour for The Con, and I became aware of Gotye this week because he performed on SNL. I will occasionally stumble upon a more obscure band by chance or recommendation, but I just don't care enough [about constantly listening to new music; about being original; about building my pitiful iTunes collection] to actively attempt to anticipate popular artists.

And I feel no shame. Because I have other things to fill my time.

You make the world through the way you act

Once upon a time, in early 2004, I would sit in the hallway of my high school before class started, lounging against a wall with my good friend Chrissy, who, more often than not, would be scrolling through pop-punk songs on her iPod. She was among the first of my friends to own one. At the time, I was still a staunch Walkman user, and was adamant about the fact that I would never switch over to this flashy, expensive new contraption. I remember thinking to myself that I liked my CDs, with their deliberate and finite presentation of songs, and was wary of owning a device that would let me simply cherry-pick my favorites while taking away the necessity of listening to an entire album from start to finish.

My anti-iPod position now seems quaint, for obvious reasons. By Christmas 2006, I'd joined the iPod-owning masses, and today, I'd probably struggle not to appear visibly amused if I saw someone carrying around a Walkman. It'd be like watching someone print a paper saved on a floppy disc.

And yet it seems that I haven't completely grown out of my Amish-flavored sensibilities, seeing as, at this very moment, I have no desire to own an iPhone (or any other smart phone), and will put off using one for as long as possible.

My antagonistic sentiment is not uncommon, and the rationales that I give for my resistance would probably be shared by any other crotchety, technophobic killjoy you know. Some of them include:

1) "For the love of God, leave me alone."
Because I'm reachable 24/7 by text or phone call, and because I'm on my computer for much of every day, I already feel as though too much of my life is dominated by virtual, rather than live, communication and stimulation. Beyond that, I feel viscerally offended that it somehow isn't enough that I'm already constantly available by call or text -- that I need to be able to access my e-mail or Facebook during the [at most] 6-hour periods that I might be away from my computer during the day. I imagine these kind of implicit social demands are the kinds of things that make earth houses seem appealing.

2) Big Brother
This is the security/privacy argument. When it comes to internet privacy, my attitude leans Spicoli; I'm not terribly concerned. Cell phone privacy, however, is a different animal, mostly because your smart phone knows where you sleep. And eat. And travel. If NCIS is to be believed, all cell phones are traceable to a certain extent, but smart phones are loaded with software capable of revealing so much more about you, particularly the more you engage with it. The most recent issue of TIME, for example, described a new iPhone app called "Highlight," which they explain is a "people discovery" program that "reveal[s] real-life connections you didn't know you had" -- it "works by rummaging through your Facebook account to see whom you know and what topics you like. Then it uses your iPhone's GPS to inform you when... a former co-worker's buddy is in your immediate vicinity or when a good-looking patron who loves the same bands you do sits down at the other end of the bar." This is just one app, of course, but the growing market for these sorts of apps suggest to me that it's only a matter of time before smart phones double as stalker-candy.

3) The Ms. Manners Objection
Say you're having lunch with a friend, and you suddenly feel the impulse to check your Facebook. Despite centuries of Western social codes that indicate that you should ignore your narcissistic whims and keep your attention directed at your friend, "dropping your head and fixing your eyes on your lap, presumably at your phone" has somehow become an accepted unspoken social gesture, indicating that your flesh-and-blood friend needs to pause their human conversation and wait patiently for you to finish and zone in again. I resist iPhone ownership in part because I'd like to avoid a world in which social situations might regularly require me to yell, "Eyes on me!" like a first-grade teacher.

4) Going Pinko
I've become irritated by the recent influx of stores offering coupons or discounts that assume smart-phone ownership as part of the advertising. Some places offer discounts if you "check in" to their location, or if you scan an available bar code upon arrival. Other places will send coupons to your smart phone, which the cashier can then scan when you check out. As a rabid bargain shopper and non-smart phone owner, this trend sends me into a completely irrational Marxist frenzy. "Oh, so only the rich deserve access to coupons? The people who can't afford smart phones somehow aren't worthy of your discounts?" I could probably personally afford a smart phone, so my pinko angst is mostly inappropriate, but I still find it questionable that a good chunk of the advertising industry is treating smart phone ownership as the norm, as opposed to a privilege of bourgeois commodity-fetishists -- or at least people who can afford to shell out for a data plan.

5) I don't like change.
I'd be lying if this wasn't part of it. Getting used to an iPhone sounds exhausting.

Considering that most of this list already sounds, even to me, like a denture-soaking octogenarian complaining about hoodlums and waxing nostalgic about penny candy, I assume that resistance is futile, and that I'm protesting a cultural shift already halfway (or more) complete. I'll be unsurprised if in as little as a year, I come around to the benefits of smart phones (I can stop getting lost in the stupid winding streets of Boston!) and laugh at the stubborn-mindedness of this blogtacular whine-fest. In a short amount of time, I'll probably have already turned my change-resistant eye to the next preposterous technological development.

Even if that happens, though, I'm pretty sure that, while happily engaging in the next stage of my gadget-enlightenment, I'll still think Twitter is stupid.

And how I got to where I am

Today I was on campus, in the library, getting some reading done before my 4:30 class. My stomach growled. It was around 3:30, and I hadn't eaten since the handful of pretzels I'd munched on at noon, which sufficed as my lunch. I typically plan better than this and pack a snack. Knowing that I wouldn't have access to my fridge until after my class ended at 7:00, I considered my options. I could pay for a $1.00 granola bar from the vending machine, or I could wait it out. (It should be noted that, as a mid- to upper-class resident of an industrialized nation, it's not like I'm starving.) I chose what I always choose: the free option. I waited, (appalled at the idea that the vending machine charges $1 for a mere granola bar) and fed my grumbling tummy sufficiently at around 8 p.m. when I got home.

All of my friends probably know this about me already, but it's something that I rarely talk about, and something that no one would typically bring up in everyday conversation: I'm a frugal person. You could also call me thrifty, or a saver, or a cheapskate, or a miser, depending on how offensive you're feeling today. No matter the label, the fact is that I'm great at saving money and have a hard time spending it.

Now that I've lived about a quarter-century and have met an assortment of people, I'm led to believe that frugality is an inherited quality -- and I don't mean genetically. It's the kind of behavior that your parents will culturally instill in you during your upbringing. I was taught to be money-conscious at an early age. I learned that money was something that you worked for, not something that you just have, and that it's important to keep a constant eye on your spending-to-earning ratio if you want to make any plans. Do you want to go to college? Well, can you pay for it? Debt is bad. Savings are important, and every purchase needs to be considered in light of its necessity. Could you be saving this money? Should you? My sister is the same way.

I have no idea whether my parents actually intended to indoctrinate me with these values, but nevertheless, here they are. As a result, I've become a relatively financially successful adult (something that I do believe my parents are proud of). I've consistently saved money, no matter my wage. I worked throughout college, lived within my means, kept a hawk's eye on my checking account, and saved enough to pay back my student loans by the time I completed undergrad. As far as my bank and the credit-monitoring institutions are concerned, my lifestyle and fiscal outlook are fabulous.

Over time, though, I've learned that being an objectively successful financial planner has its downsides. There are the immediate drawbacks (such as turning down invitations to go out to dinner with friends because eating at home is cheaper, or opting to order a side salad when you do deign to go out). But then there are the lasting downsides (e.g., Your friends will never perceive you as carefree or flexible because it slowly becomes clear that every decision you make is financially pre-calculated). If you aspire to be a generous person, as I do, it's a little crushing to realize that your fiscally Gollum-like impulses are antithetical to that goal.

Granted, of all the problems in the world to have, the "I'm too good at saving money" problem has to rank just below "Everyone keeps getting distracted by my how pretty I am" as among the least pitiable issues on the planet.

At the same time, though, a problem is a problem. And once you've realized that your frugality is a little excessive, how do you proceed? Habits are habits; they're difficult to interrupt. My calculator brain revs up every time I'm in a money-spending situation, and there's no real way to avoid that. I will always pick the least expensive menu item at a restaurant, and I will always attempt to figure out the maximum value I can extract from a gift card at a retail store. I feel physically strained when I have to spend money that I know isn't necessary. I've learned to train myself to accept the periodic splurge -- say, a donation, a meal out, or a vacation. I've learned that it's okay to buy full-priced items sometimes. I'm not convinced, however, that I'll ever be able to fully train my brain to shift out of its Depression-era setting, and frankly, it's not clear that I should want to. The downsides and upsides tend to counteract each other.

...

Honestly, I had no real reason for authoring this post, other than the fact that I realized that I'd never explicitly written about this before. Considering the amount of cortex space that this topic takes up in my brain -- it seemed like it was time.

I am out here studying stones

[If you're bothered by nitpicky criticism, I recommend that you skip the following.]

I recently subscribed to TIME magazine (despite my previously documented disdain for the reporting skills of major, glossy-covered news weeklies). It is one of the major channels through which I get my awareness of news and current events -- the others being The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and occasionally even real news websites like the BBC. Altogether, I like to think that my selection offers a decent (if liberally inclined) cross-section of news, comprised of media outlets that, for the most part, still have a healthy respect for journalistic integrity, even if some of it is in the form of freakishly hyperbolic satire.

This week, one of my sources of news (The Daily Show) turned on one of the others (TIME) with the ferocity and impact of an ill-tempered chihuahua. Jon Stewart ran a segment castigating this week's issue of TIME, and it went something like this:


In Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific, TIME subscribers (that random offshoot of international readers desperate for even more American-centered news, I guess) received their magazines with the cover shown above. The Old White Guy is Mario Monti, the Prime Minister of Italy, and the associated story focuses on how he, Wrinkly-Superman, will save all of Europe from economic collapse.

At this point, Jon Stewart put on his sarcasm voice, and noted that the American cover was somewhat different...

Zing! You've been snapped!

Still wielding the full power of scarcasmvoice, Jon elaborated: "I’m not saying TIME has a low opinion of its American readers, but the editors of Highlights for Children got pitched the same 'pet friends' story and they said, 'It’s a little soft, isn’t it? Our readers are kids, but, you know, they’ve got heads.'"

This is classic and common Daily Show fare, and Jon, in typical fashion, goes on to point out that TIME has pulled this exact bait-and-switch move multiple times before, running more serious-appearing or internationally focused covers in E/A/SP, while running some sort of lifestyle fluff in the U.S. Insert the obvious point: Americans are dim-witted and ignorant about global issues, and media institutions like TIME only perpetuate the problem. Duly noted, Jon.

When I got this week's issue of TIME in the mail, I had the same raised-eyebrow reaction to the cover story as the Daily Show (e.g. "Animal friendships? Really? Was 'Kittens are soooo cute!' taken?"). Like most issues of TIME, though, the cover didn't serve as a good representative sample for the content of the magazine. In addition to the regular sections and columns (and, of course, a lengthy article on animal friendships), the recent issue featured a six-page spread on Syria, two pages on wealth and the presidency, and also this:


A three-page spread on Mario Monti, the Prime Minister of Italy, and on how he, Wrinkly-Superman, will save all of Europe from economic collapse.

I concede to Jon that the cover comparison makes the U.S. look bad. That surface-level criticism stands. What bothers me is that, in the segment, Jon implies that not only the covers, but the cover stories, were replaced in the American issues -- that TIME insults their American readers by actually censoring the most important or global stories. He assumes that a different international cover automatically indicates that TIME has hidden an important story from the Americans, babying them instead with a soft human interest story. This is bothersome in that 1) it takes for granted that social- and cultural stories are less important than global politics or finance (which is certainly not always the case), and 2) more often than not (and this week's issue is case in point) the more hard-hitting stories still appear in both magazines.The underlying concern, I suppose, remains the same: Americans aren't terribly interested in the Italian Prime Minister and his impact on Europe. But even if the American cover doesn't feature SuperItalian, the article content is there, in the issue. Unsuspecting readers eager to learn about BFF chimpanzees may unwittingly learn something about European politics when (and I realize this is an optimistic when) they read the magazine in full, and so Jon's portrayal of TIME as some infantilizing Big Brother figure is misleading.

You may be thinking:For the love of God, why do you care about this? The Daily Show does this to Fox News ALL THE TIME. Also, you know, it's an entertainment show. On Comedy Central.Sure. But Fox News is honestly ridiculous much of the time, and I really do count on Jon Stewart and Colbert to find (rather than fabricate) absurdity in the media and in politics. I get [perhaps naively] disappointed when The Daily Show or Colbert Report wastes their very real rhetorical power (see: Jon Stewart on income inequality; Colbert's SuperPAC) on something petty.< / fangirl hissyfit >
P.S. This is the time.com homepage that appears when you log in as a subscriber. They're not even hiding it.