Dark Brown Waffles

…and then some asshole writes something like this and you want to say, “Fuck it, I can’t do that.” That, for the record, is good journalism, entirely unlike the utter crap that is produced so mindlessly by so many, and if that makes me nothing more than the author’s fanboy, so be it. I’d be willing to wager that there is more real work done in that relatively brief article than appears in the entirety of almost every American newspaper on a daily basis.

In what was an apparently horrendous fashion faux-pas, an actress at the Golden Globes - an actress whose work was highly praised via a nomination that she received for it- was caught wearing toe shoes. This is nightmarish, according to the people who trouble themselves with caring about what third-parties are wearing out in public. The author writes:

Vibram Five Fingers are not appropriate footwear for a black tie event. Nor, I would argue, are toe shoes (this kind, not the sort used in ballet) appropriate for the supermarket, the airport, the library, the restaurant, or anywhere else that’s not a running trail or a gym: nobody wants to see your creepy, articulated toes, hippies.

Here is another option for the author: fuck off. Without ever having spoken to the actress in question, whose work I haven’t seen, I’m going to assume that she chose those particular shoes because she found them - HEAVEN FORBID! - comfortable. The author acknowledges as much later:

They should be allowed to wear things that are weird, or unflattering, or that betray a preference for comfort, or show what someone older and more sensible might say is “too much” skin; making mistakes, so long as you learn from them, is a large part of developing your own taste. 

You’ll note that in this acknowledgement though, the author writes as though preferring comfort over the alternative (discomfort) is somehow a mistake that public figures must learn to avoid. Why? Because if they don’t…the author will be bored:

The alternative — awards show after awards show of generically flattering, stylist-selected blush-colored dresses and Louboutins — is almost too stultifying to contemplate.

Because you see, this young woman owes the author the entertainment value of her clothing. Owes her. Just as journalists owe their corporate owners a world in which jeans don’t exist. Just as everybody owes hipsters a world without fashion that they personally approve of. It is almost as if none of these people is capable of accepting a world in which different people make decisions differently than their own.

My wife today was aghast that I chose to go to work without having combed my hair. I chose to do so for three reasons: my hair is at a length where it cannot be combed, it was pouring rain which allowed my hair to get wet and thus fixed, and because if somebody is going to interact with me professionally but not be able to get past the bird’s nest upon my dome, fuck ‘em. Seriously, fuck ‘em. As if somehow I cannot be good at my job if my hair is a wreck; as if somehow I cannot be effective because I am wearing jeans instead of a three piece suit; as if somehow I am less capable because I haven’t shaved in several weeks.

Because implicitly, that is at least part of the argument that these people are making. Let’s revisit that actress for a minute. She appeared in a film - the well-reviewed George Clooney The Descendants - and was nominated for her performance. So she chose to dress nicely by almost every standard that people (who she has probably never met) invented out of ether, save one. And that one refusal to conform to standards that she never agreed to her in the first place is enough for these people to make her an object of derision. The fact that she apparently gave a great performance in an appreciated movie is outweighed by the HIDEOUS DECISION TO PRIORITIZE HER OWN COMFORT OVER THEIR FRANKLY INSANE STANDARDS.

I dream of the day when this sort of judgment is turned around; when it isn’t the person who prioritizes their own comfort getting described as the weirdo, but the person getting bent out of shape about is. Because that’s how it ought to work. These folks revel in the rank condescension that they visit upon others for the crime of prioritizing their world differently. That’s literally the entirety of their contribution to the world. They offer nothing more substantive than a list of rules which they have privately agreed too; that the rest of us haven’t is simply of no matter.

What truly confuses is why they simply can’t enjoy the things that they enjoy - like being uncomfortable apparently - without insisting that everybody else be uncomfortable too. Is the world really so awful if somebody thinks wearing toe shoes is a better idea than wearing whatever ridiculous shoes the author would have put her in instead?

Surely, there is some sort of statute of limitations on anger, on unrelenting fury that grabs ahold of you at the most unexpected and unwelcome times. How can anybody continue to be angry about things that happened five, ten, fifteen years ago? 

And when I ask generally, I mean specifically, about myself. I suppose there are some things that I can push into the background far enough to be beyond my reach. But there are some things that cannot, despite enough time having passed so that even I think the response outweighs the crime. 

I was asked about the specifics by a friend. They don’t matter I don’t think, at least in this case, but maybe only because I don’t want them to matter. 

Also, how can I be 31 and still writing like a teenager? Surely I’ll outgrow this phase.

In the summer of 2000, when I was 19, I went to work for an unnamed media organization at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. I spent three weeks working for them and made close to $3000, which I immediately turned into a car that I continue to love despite totaling it eight years ago. I genuinely still love that car.

In retrospect, the most important thing I took from that experience wasn’t the car but my first realization that the media might not be functioning in the way that a younger me imagined that it was. This realization was fueled primarily by the other interns I worked with and the media professionals that I worked for. How to put this gently: they were awful.

Sycophantic is a better word. These were people overwhelmingly obsessed with something other than gathering and reporting news. This was apparent almost immediately: we had an intern training session in which we were instructed upon the right way to put a paperclip on a packet of papers, lest the man on the television that we all ostensibly worked for burst into tears and then burst into fury. To the instructor, this was the most important consideration. When we introduced ourselves and our experiences, my meager resume (starting at 16 in the newsroom of a collegiate newspaper with a circulation of more than 15,000, winning that newspaper’s Employee of the Year award while a senior in high school, becoming the managing editor of another collegiate newspaper with a circulation of more than 15,000 while a freshmen) didn’t measure up against the kids who were going to Northwestern and Syracuse and Emory because the places I’d work and the schools I’d attended didn’t offer the status that those institutions did. The fact that I had genuine experience made me a weirdo, not a member of the club in good standing. When were offered the opportunity to go to a press conference and ask questions, fewer than half of the interns hands went up. Fewer than half of that group actually ended up going. And at the end of the assignment, when it came time to create something for the show’s website, the daughter of one of the show’s producers was chosen. Last I heard, she works somewhere in Texas doing “journalism.”

While I was there, I was reading Hunter S. Thompson, the way disaffected young people often do. I was reading Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72 which I remember as the greatest book about journalism that I’d ever read. That might not still be true although it remains my fallback position whenever the question comes up. I asked one of the older journalists who worked at the show about Thompson because I’d seen this man’s name referenced in the book and he said, “Yeah, Thompson was a wild character…” and then changed the subject as if Thompson’s name wasn’t bigger than his own. It was baffling. How could this journalist not at least admire that journalist, given what both had accomplished? But nothing.

Why write all of this? Because of this madness, an article of unabashed hogwash in what passes for an important publication. The article asks whether reporters should ask politicians to back up their claims with facts or if they should, instead, reprint claims made without question. Which, in case you’re wondering, is all that journalism is these days: sycophants worshiping the people with power, refusing to dig any deeper, refusing to report any more than what those people want reported. If it isn’t beneficial to the people with power, it damn sure isn’t appearing in a newspaper, a headline, a magazine, or anywhere else.

I know how this reads: sour grapes. My conclusions are drawn upon limited experience, to be sure. But I assure you that articles like this only reinforce my realization that so many journalists are utterly useless human beings, content simply to spend a life as a hanger-on, desperately suckling up to those with more power than themselves, dedicated to a life of preserving and defending the status quo above all other concerns.

Or, more briefly: if our political-media establishment were all suddenly whisked away to a desert island to re-enact Lord of the Flies, would any of the rest of us be any worse off than we are right now?

I am forever aghast at the societal imposition of norms upon individuals even though I do precisely the same thing myself on an almost daily basis. Ask me, for example, about skinny leg jeans and my head will explode and go rolling down the street. Still, I read with great interest Erik Kain’s brief missive on the issue conformity and stealth variations of non-conformity. 

To be brief: I disagree.

To not be brief: I think Kain and the author he is citing (Robin Hanson) are fundamentally misunderstanding the actions of the people they’re describing as “non-conformists.” They’re not doing this out of ill will; they’re simply assuming their own values onto those individuals without giving sufficient regard to their needs and wants. It’s the same thing we all do when we run up against people who make decisions that we don’t. We strive for a grand explanation of that behavior instead of a much more simple and much more obvious one. Before I go further though, I should mention that my baseline belief is that people make the decisions they want to make, and that those decisions make rational sense to them as individuals, even if the rest of can’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. That is applicable here for reasons I’ll discuss.

“I’ve known some very successful people with quite weird ideas,” Hanson writes. “But these folks mostly keep regular schedules of sleep and bathing. Their dress and hairstyles are modest, they show up on time for meetings, and they finish assignments by deadline.”

First, we have a definition of nonconformity being hinted at without being stated explicitly, wherein the term is applied to people who do not sleep at the appropriate hours, who do not bathe on an appropriate basis, who do not maintain modest dress and hairstyles, who show up late for meetings, and who do not finish their work on time. It seems me that it is quite possible that Hanson is speaking about one particular individual, given how broadly some of these categories apply to humanity generally. Surely there are plenty of human beings who are simultaneously clean and yet awake at odd hours. Surely there are plenty of human beings who are simultaneously neatly presented but perpetually five minutes late. 

“When some folks go out of their way to show off their defiance and rebellion,” Hanson continues, “others go out of their way to publicly squash such rebellion, to assert their dominance. But if you are not overtly rebellious, you can get away with a lot of abstract idea rebellion — few folks will even notice such deviations, and fewer still will care.”

Why would we assume that the individual showing off their defiance and rebellion is actually prioritizing idea rebellion? What is that conclusion based on? Because it seems to me that the person with pink hair may be less interested in idea rebellion than they are in having pink hair. 

From that only tenuously established baseline - wherein the rebellious person isn’t allowed to speak for themselves but rather has their motivations established for them by third parties - we have Kain’s commentary:

The risk with making your rebellion too extroverted is that you trade one status quo for another. Your outward rebellion now has to conform to a particular group you are now affiliating yourself with. You join a tribe – and you run the risk of accepting all the group-think of the tribe in question. See again, e.g., college.

The baseline assumption of all of this is there in the first sentence: “The risk with making your rebellion…” Because obviously, having pink hair is evidence of rebellion as opposed to merely an expression of individual interests and affectations, ones that we all have in some form or another. Thus, it cannot simply be that the person with pink hair likes having pink hair; it has to instead be a revolutionary act intended for third parties. 

Here is a practical example: I like shaving my head. Not all of the time, but occasionally. This infuriates my mother, despite the fact that I am now in my 30’s, because she believes I look better with longer hair. That is parenting at work. But it is never simply enough for me to tell her, “Hey Mom, I like having a shaved head.” She is forever convinced that I am attempting to send some message out to the world at large: about my politics, about my emotions, about something else unknown. It can’t just be that I like it. 

We’re seeing the same thing at work in these two articles. They’re dismissing one of the most obvious explanations for one of the most complex, and they’re simultaneously assuming their own standards onto third parties whose own priorities they never bother to account for. In essence, they’re saying, “If I had pink hair, it would be because I wanted to send a message, thus, because that young woman has pink hair, she’s trying to send a message.” 

Back to Hanson:

So, ask yourself, do you want to look like a rebel, or do you want to be a rebel?

Respectfully, what if the answer is neither? What if the answer is something as simply as the *act of alleged rebellion* is actually just an expression of what the individual likes? Perhaps - instead of making sweeping generalizations about people assumed to be nonconformists - it makes more sense to assume that those people who seem to be different are doing exactly what we all are: what we like.  

A quick postscript for 2011: I didn’t do anything of note. An entire year went by with nothing to show for it. That’s lame. So for 2012, the following:

Write More: because I don’t write now, and because it is a thing I’ve spent a long time doing and loving. I have no idea what success will be defined as, so we’ll simply say 200,000 words or more. And no, I don’t have idea how I’ll count that. 

Exercise More: at least run more. It’s ridiculous that my running has slowed to a crawl, although dodgy knees and dodgier temperatures have made it easier for me to stay in bed and on the couch. 

Eat Better: I know how I’ll measure this one. Specifically, I’ll weigh 225-230 pounds. Maybe that’s setting the bar too low - “Why don’t you shoot for 210, huh?” say people I don’t like - but I have to account for reality, and the reality is that my frame would look better to me if I weighed about 225 pounds. Anything less than that is unrealistic. Anything more than that is a bummer. 

We’ll see though. I have a history of making these promises and not following through. Still, it’s getting to be depressing, getting older and doing less of the things I love and more of the things that I don’t.