Culture

Lady Gaga finally loses it

May 31, 2013 11:49 am•By: •What say you?

One of the things I find fascinating about dreams is how often they are such nonsense, but sometimes they are such insightful nonsense.  The nightly hiccups of our subconscious represent the absurdities of life in ways that illuminate just how absurd our waking life really is.

Last night I had a bizarre dream about Lady Gaga.  (To say I had a bizarre dream about Lady Gaga who herself tries to be a living totem to the bizarre sounds redundant, I know.)  She was traveling along at the front of some caravan-type contraption, escorted from behind by a diverse foursome of mixed genders.

Lady Gaga herself was subdued in sunglasses and shapeless dark clothes — no strange get-up, no hair art, no makeup.  Her companions covered a small spectrum from beautiful girl next door to flamboyant gay male.   I had some matter I was supposed to discuss with her, but when I approached her directly she wordlessly refused to acknowledge my presence.

I was then informed by some sort of security handler that Lady Gaga no longer interacted personally with others herself.  Instead, she had selected these four people to escort her everywhere and serve as her proxy to the world.  Whenever she needed or wanted to engage with anything beyond her immediate person, she would choose one of her foursome to act and speak on her behalf while she and the others hovered silently without emotion nearby.

Some explanation for this was offered to me, as the beautiful but plain female member of the entourage received some invisible indication that she was the one to come forward and hold the discussion I requested.  I was told that this was Lady Gaga’s latest performance art, an experiment in human existence as simply that.  No action, no interaction, no being.  She had outsourced her ego to these four and entrusted them with accurately being her self and conveying her self, in the form of many selves, on her behalf.  This liberated her from the burden of being Lady Gaga – a conscious, acting human — and allowed her to try and experience the transcendence of having solely a physical presence like a rock or a tree.

Like I said, bizarre.

But, maybe not.  Because, like that dream I had about Beyonce and Jay-Z, as surreal as this is I would not even stop to go “huh?” if one day I read about Lady Gaga (or some other avant garde weirdo) going around with this art show/existential experiment exactly as described in my dream.

Posted in Celebrity, Culture
about , ,
What say you?

Business Casual Sex

May 28, 2013 9:39 am•By: •What say you?

This past week, as the temperatures finally started to climb into something more seasonal for late May, I decided it was probably safe to go ahead and switch out my  winter wardrobe for summer clothes.  In doing so, I also purged the worn-out, worn-down, never-to-be-worn-again items that I’d held onto optimistically when I packed away my summer wardrobe so many months ago.  I’d been clinging to a lot of crap for way too long, mostly bad office-appropriate, business casual type stuff.  And that’s when I realized almost everything suitable for warmer weather in my closet was wear-for-summer-fun around town, not wear-for-summer-hours at work.

And as I visited store after store in an effort to remedy that deficit, I began to understand why I developed such a shortage in the first place.

Business casual can be best described as the Worst  Dress Code Ever.  I would rather be assigned regulation khaki pants and an ill-fitting polo than have to navigate the minefield that is business casual dressing.  Formal business wear, ie, full suits, is too over the top for a business casual office.  Jeans are banned.  Everything between those two ends of the spectrum is everything Americans don’t really want to wear.  But for women, it gets especially dicey.

Winter is not so bad.  In winter, I can throw on tailored pants and a sweater, pull on some boots, and call it a day.  I’ll be warm and well within the dress code bounds.  But summer.   Summer is when business casual goes from being an irritating requirement to a terrifying tightrope walk.

Shopping for summer business casual clothes is like trying to find a flattering one-piece bathing suit in stores that only sell burkas and string bikinis.  And then realizing that there is no such thing as a one-piece bathing suit that is flattering, anyway.  Clothing retailers obligate women  into one of two categories:  ”Hi, I’m Trevor’s mom” or “Look at me, I’m a total Tramp.”  And I’m sure that plenty of women are content in the former and plenty of others are willing to do battle with HR in the latter.  But the rest of us are looking for summer office clothing that says “While I am respectably employed, my femininity is not entirely asexual in nature.”

Apparently that is too complicated of a statement to translate into affordable women’s ready-to-wear.

So inevitably, white-collar working women in business-casual environments spend the summer being overdressed or under-dressed but always self-consciously dressed.  We experience glee when one of our colleagues seems to have gotten it wrong, because it assuages our own perpetual doubts that we’re not getting it right.  Our male co-workers leave their sweaters at home and carry-on in their button-downs, oblivious to the angsty  female drama playing out around them.

Sometimes I suspect business casual was designed as an obstacle to female achievement. Distract women with the need to adhere to a concept of “appropriate” defined in the vaguest of terms, and the personal resources they might have directed toward excelling in the workplace are instead spent on hours of scouring stores for “appropriate” hemlines and blouses and  hours of worrying whether what they’re wearing succeeded in being “appropriate” and still more hours considering co-workers’ success (or lack thereof) in arriving at the office dressed in something  ”appropriate.”

It’s a waste of time and energy.  And in the end, all of women’s fussing over suitable summer apparel becomes essentially moot — because when the building AC comes on, we are all huddled under sweaters and blankets at our desks anyway.

Posted in Culture
about ,
What say you?

Sprint: the not right now network

May 1, 2013 8:48 pm•By: •What say you?

The 4G gods have stopped smiling on me, if they ever did.  I wish the least of my problems over the past few weeks was that sometimes facebook photos took too long to load.  Forget about 4G.  I’m happy if my 1 bar of 3G sticks around, because too often my service magically evaporates and I’m left with nothinG.  Texts show up when they feel like it, which is usually a few hours after the Russian lover has determined I am almost certainly tied up in a trunk somewhere.  Sometimes calls don’t come through at all, and I don’t even have a missed call alerting me to the fact that someone was trying to get in touch.

The first few times he couldn’t reach me he thought I was being a jerk.  The next few times he couldn’t reach me, he went into a panic.  The times after that and Enough was Enough.  I called Sprint and learned that there were “service upgrades” happening and hopefully the disruptions would cease soon.  In the next week or so.  Probably. They apologized for the inconvenience and asked for my patience and offered that they could credit me 25 bucks for the hassle.

I called back, because missing important calls from people for whom I am the sole point of contact on certain matters is not a hassle.  It is a potentially career-ending, relationship-killing huge fucking problem that only Sprint customers in this city seem to be having.  And I talked to some supervisor’s supervisor and I got nowhere on being let out of contract without an ETF or being credited an amount of money would offset that ETF.  As far as Sprint is concerned, this level of service falls within their acceptable bounds.

Sprint CS explained that they couldn’t guarantee service everywhere people go. I explained that if they couldn’t guarantee service smack-dab in the middle of the fifth largest city in the United States, then they should stop pretending to be a major national cellular carrier.  Maybe get Candace Bergen back and try to sell people some long distance minutes again.

4G Phl

Sprint 4G map of Philly via sensorly.com

The circled areas are where I happen to spend a good deal of time, in the center of the city, where coverage is looking a little sparse according to this map.  The other areas of Philadelphia that have similar-looking coverage on this map are places where people regularly get shot.  Sprint 4G: The social equalizer.

When I was with the Russian lover in NYC, I thought I was pretty good with 4G for much of the time we were bumming around Manhattan.  But there, too, it didn’t seem consistently good.  So today I also pulled up the 4G map for New York; the circled area is where the Russian lover’s crash pad is located, and where we spend a fair amount of time:

NYC 4G

Foiled again.

And now I think I understand the main reason people want to be famous.  Because if there is one thing celebrities are not, it is helpless consumers in the face of inferior products and services.  If Beyonce called Pepsi saying “This new soda of yours I just tried is gross”, Pepsi would not be like “Thank you for your valuable feedback.  We are so sorry” and leave Beyonce out a couple of bucks.  They would respond by dispatching a team tasked with creating a new soda to Beyonce’s specifications.  Meanwhile, when Coke got wind of her displeasure, they’d offer her a billion dollars to abandon her Pepsi endorsement.  A bidding war would ensue.  Beyonce would be gifted with endless amounts of gratis superior cola product.  That is consumer power.

Somehow, I don’t think any service provider is going to try to hold Beyonce hostage to her cell phone contract.  The rest of us?  We just have to yell and tweet and blog and try to band together until enough of us add up to one Beyonce.  Because the only hope we regular people have against incompetent corporate tyrants like the now network is the momentum of our human networks.

Posted in Celebrity, Culture, Science and Tech
about , , , , ,
What say you?