Pop Culture Update

We have a new post on toxic work environments up - take a gander here if you have the time!

New Update

Another Your Life through Pop Culture post is up!  If you have a few minutes and would enjoy deconstructing some failed celebrity apologies with me, take a gander!

Professionalism and Pop Culture Update (The titles just keep getting more exciting)

Hi, folks!  For anyone who has ever watched Beyoncé perform and thought, "Awesome, but how can I apply this to my professional life?"  I have a post for you!  If you're so inclined, check out my most recent post on my guest series for Matt Arch's website.  Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see next.  Not that I don't have any ideas and would appropriate yours.  

 

Shameless Self-Promotion

Hi folks.  For the past few weeks I've been working with the wonderful Matt Arch to help enhance his (already very cool) website.  Matt's asked me to be a guest blogger for a series entitled Your Life through Pop Culture, where I'll examine the spheres of popular culture and the life of young professionals to see where there's overlap.  You can check out the first installment here.

Happy reading!

The Princess Diaries (Without Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews, and Everything Else You Loved about The Princess Diaries)

This past New Year’s Eve my parents’ friends brought their children Liam and Kaitlyn (ages five and four respectively) to our house.  I can’t help but be stereotypically nostalgic when talking with little kids.  They have the best goals.  They want to fly, save the world, battle dragons, and other mythical and impossible but still metaphorically poignant things.  By the time you become an adult, your goals shift from “I bet I could be the fastest person in the world” to “I bet I could eat that whole doughnut in one bite.” 

But one thing for which I felt absolutely no nostalgia was playing princess – mostly because I legitimately never had.  I mean, Jess had certainly played princess, and I definitely played with her, but I would generally opt to be Batman.  We Rush girls played fast and loose with our genres.  It’s not that, from the ages of three to ten, I was ideologically opposed to princesses, it’s that I was plagued by one, all-consuming question:

“OK, but what do princesses do?” 

Kaitlyn gave me a look of rapidly depleting patience.  I had briefly won her favor by pitching the idea of Princess Club. (This after Kaitlyn had gravely approached me, saying, “You can’t be in the Princess Club.”  Not incredibly surprised by this pronouncement, I still felt compelled to ask why.  “Because there is no club.”  Unable to argue with that logic, I nodded.  “Ah.  I see.  I wonder, though, if we could make a Princess Club?”)  But it would seem that I could not ride on the coattails of that moment of brilliance forever, especially not if I kept asking impertinent questions.

From a young age, though, I had no interest in being a princess, simply because the functionality of those young girls eluded me.  If I were to be a princess, did I have to pretend to be in an enchanted sleep or helplessly circle around my “tower” for a half an hour until I was saved by someone doing something more exciting?  The appeal escaped me, as did plenty of normative consumer opportunities.  Many pink dresses were received as gifts and then distastefully handed over to my sister.

Kaitlyn assembled the members of the Princess Club.  Aside from me, other reigning members included Jess and my friend Shaina.  Criteria for membership included: a) being a girl (“This feels a little essentialist,” I mumbled to Jess, who elbowed me in the side) b) having at least one, if not more princess stickers, distributed by Kaitlyn (I had three.  One was given freely, another was begged for, and the third was stolen so if these stickers were declared currency in our new club, I would have a chance to be the richest in the land – a rare opportunity for a graduate student). 

As we gathered for our first meeting, Liam formed the rival Car Club which consisted of all the boys in the house.  Liam had already shown infinite patience with me when, earlier that night, I asked if I could color with him.  He was a meticulous colorer, a fact I pointed out admiringly when I promised to be careful with our joint-picture.  A minute later he sighed and said, “Um.  That’s supposed to be grass?  You’re coloring it black.”  And, yup.  Sure enough.  So I scribbled over it in green, and he grinningly declared that I had made “dead grass,” which was certainly a utilization of poetic license on his part, but cool.  To be honest, there was a dark period of the night when my shenanigans meant I was allowed in neither the Princess Club nor the Car Club.  Story of my life. Nonetheless, I was immediately suspicious of this gender divide between the groups, and necessarily had to focus my attention on subverting the norms of the Princess Club.

To do this I obviously had to become President Princess.  You may think, “Uh, Queen?” but you’d be wrong.  Everyone knows queens are old, evil, and vain, teetering on the ever-present edge of losing their beauty and their sanity.  So, inspired by the youthful ambition all around me – Liam wanted to be a car, for God’s sake - President Princess was my goal.  My multitude of stickers did not seem to be convincing Kaitlyn of my propensity to rule, so I took Shaina downstairs to my mother’s office.  My mother is an independent beauty consultant, and her office is covered with material befitting for princesses – pink, silver, and lots of sparkles surrounded us, and, out of place as I was in this color scheme, I grabbed a pink scarf from a dressing table, placed a tiara on my head, and fumbled with some dangly jewelry.

Shaina meekly fiddled with a bracelet, not wanting to disturb my mother’s office.  This attitude is exactly why she will never truly be President Princess. 

“Uh, should I…dress up?”  Shaina asked, as I [princess] motioned for her to follow me upstairs. 

I looked around the room and grabbed a travel pillow that fits around one’s neck.  Thrusting it on Shaina’s shoulders, I barked, “There.  You’re beautiful.  Let’s go – I have a throne to usurp!”

This had all started out as an exercise in reflection.  I wanted to ask my young friends why only girls could be in the Princess Club.  Why couldn’t I wear a car sticker on my hand next to the princess stickers?  But since these opportunities to explode gender norms had not been embraced by the youths, I decided I would rule the Princess Club and then let (or forcefully make) everyone a part of it.  So, essentially, I started out hoping to teach the children about social justice, and then I ended up teaching them about benevolent dictatorships. 

Despite the fact I was clearly the most princess-looking of all of us – I had a tiara!  I have never worn a tiara in my life and still don’t understand why people want to, but isn’t that supposed to be mean something dammit – Kaitlyn never once declared me President Princess.  Even after, joints cracking, I pseudo-sat in the tiny princess chair my mother had purchased for Kaitlyn’s visits (then she only looked at me with irritation and honest to God told on me to my mother, who exasperatedly scolded me for not sharing), I was still not considered fit to rule.

“You can be President Princess,” she said, walking over to Shaina and sitting in her lap.

“What?  But she’s wearing a pillow on her neck!”  I said, choking slightly as I inhaled some glitter from my scarf.  “She looks ridiculous,” I coughed into my arm.

Kaitlyn shrugged as Jess guffawed.  Liam approached the scene shyly. 

“Could I be in the Princess Club?”  The number of boys at the party was slim, and while Liam had quietly been amusing himself, he clearly wanted some companionship. 

I anticipated having another patient conversation about embracing gender deviance with Kaitlyn, but she surprised me.

“Yeah. C’mon.”  Looking at us she said simply, “Liam can be in the club because he’s my friend.”

Well, then. 

So, yeah, I’m unsurprisingly bad at playing princess, but not just for all of the reasons one would suspect.  To be fair, I am 23 years old and still have vivid memories of looking for girls in the media who were being active in a way I could appreciate, finding none, and having to turn to role models outside of the normative framework.  But I also see more nuances now than I did then.  I see how as a princess you have the power to make friends with, like, singing animals and magical fairies.  You also have the power to let your friend into a club they maybe aren’t socially ideal for.  Action and power do not always manifest themselves in the stereotypically masculine manner of sword fights and dragon slayings.  Therefore, while my question of functionality is apt, we must acknowledge the social biases that codify our ideas of strength in order to honestly answer my question of “What do princess do?” 

*My friend also blogged about princesses, and you should totally check it out. 

** I have recently taken up the role as editor of another friend’s website, where I will be guest-blogging a few times a month about being young and negotiating the challenges and opportunities that can arise from your career.  So please keep an eye out for those posts, which I’ll link you to from here.  Definitely check out Matt Arch’s blog, as it will certainly teach you more about being a young professional than I can teach you about being a princess.

Overcoming the Space of "Meh"

I don’t really write/talk a lot about body image, and the reasons for that are fairly boring.  First of all, I don’t think I have much to add to the discussion: I feel like we should all love our bodies, but I understand why we often can’t, and I’m reluctant to contribute to the guilt people feel for failing to cultivate a healthy body image.  This array of feelings makes me the world’s most indecisive cheerleader, “Love your body!  Unless you can’t, which is understandable because of the oppressive onslaught of images the media throws at us and the way we all judge and punish one another for failing to fit into unrealistic confines of ‘beauty.’ So if you can’t, that’s OK!  I wish you would, but…What?  Oh.  Sorry.” And someone then would take away my pom-poms and megaphone, and rightly so.  I don’t really know, in this hypothetical, who was foolish enough to give me a megaphone in the first place. 

The other related reason I don’t really discuss this very important issue is that I have no wisdom to pass on to those suffering from a bad body image.  If I can shamelessly generalize for a moment, people who talk effectively about body images are often people who either really hate or really love their bodies.  I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of body love/hate, in an area that, in my psychological and sociological expertise, I will label “meh.” I don’t experience the perpetual self-loathing that becomes disease which so many people have bravely fought through, but I also spend exactly no time celebrating how I look.  I spend a lot of time actively not thinking about my appearance, but I don’t do this out of an evolved sense of humility, I do this because I want to avoid that perpetual dissatisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong, my body is a good companion.  It doesn’t get sick very often, and when it does it knows we still have to get things done, so it very seldom requires a lot of doting.  It has worked despite quite a few sprains, torn ligaments, and out of place joints, and only emits muffled complaints on rainy days and cold mornings.  It has learned that coffee is amazing, and, whatever “experts” say, this magical beverage actually has its own level on the food pyramid, and we should revere that.  So I appreciate my body on a functional level.  I’m healthy, and that’s fantastic.  I could totally teach a class on “Listening to Your Body Except When You Don’t Want To Because You Have Papers to Write Or Other Things That Need Done,” but I did not think I could write a blog post about “Loving Your Body.”

And yet here we are, so what happened (you may rightly ask, as you wait for me to get to a point)?  Well, this happened, and that happened, and it’s almost summer, so I keep running across articles telling me how to get a bikini-ready body, when all it takes to have a bikini-ready body is buying a bikini you like and putting it on your body.  In other words, my people, shit is going down, and I am not amused.

I’m not here to warn you about the scary, nefarious Media.  We know the media doesn’t particularly care if a size ten girl is sadly perusing a magazine where the models are so thin it’s like an inadvertent game of Where’s Waldo.  I think the people who point out the flaws in advertising do very important, necessary work, and I also think that we as individuals need to acknowledge that there’s more work to be done that only we can do for ourselves.  There have been many times where I have doggedly deconstructed a commercial’s harmful portrayals of the female or male body, and then spent the rest of my afternoon dodging mirrors because I was having a fat day.  Really, “meh” is not an empowering place to be, and as fun as tearing down the media is, we need to do more.

I’m going to sound like Oprah or maybe the Dalai Lama for a second, so bear with me: The work we need to do starts inside, and I believe it starts from a place of gratitude.  Maybe we do start by being grateful that our bodies actually work for us, that they fight off disease, and that if we ask them to run a marathon for us, they might be like, “Seriously? Why? Will this cut into our Game of Thrones time?” but ultimately agree as long as we provide cupcakes afterwards.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever live in a world where appearances don’t matter, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  There are a lot of beautiful people out there, waiting to be appreciated.  But, that’s sort of my point here: we are the beautiful people, and we need to stop waiting to be appreciated.  We can’t afford to wait any longer for the media to change or for standards of beauty to be adjusted.  We need to find a place for ourselves in the world we have now.

If we can be happy with the things our bodies do (maybe you have great eyesight, maybe you have horrible eyesight but that allowed you to get kickass glasses, maybe one time in second grade you were the only person to make it across the monkey bars without falling the humiliating four feet into the dirt), that could be the secret to cultivating a thoroughly positive body image.  For example, I trip very seldom for a person who is often thinking of potential revisions to papers while walking instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  Perhaps gratitude for this will help me eventually garner appreciation for my legs. 

But on a more sincere note, a few days ago I was playing Space Monster with my five-year-old friend Liam. At one point, Liam enthusiastically tackled me, and I was able to catch him and purposefully crumble to the ground with a surprising amount of grace and dramatic flair.  I’m really grateful to have a body that allows me to do that. 

I guess I’m just asking that we approach this really complicated issue from a simple, pragmatic standpoint.  Let’s not start from “How do I look?  How do I not look?”  Let’s instead start from “What can I do?” I think that’s a more powerful place to begin, and I believe that will make our journey to healthy body images more meaningful. 

Degrees of Separation

Most of us have had the experience of walking away from a conversation, knowing exactly what we should have said.  I, personally, am always about 300 times cleverer in those imaginative alternate realities than I am in real life.  We rehearse these conversations that we had somehow botched originally, struggling restlessly with the knowledge that if we would only have another chance at that exact same conversation, we’d be so devastatingly ready that redemption would surely be ours; and our would-be retractors, those unworthy victors of the original exchange, would realize just how awesome we truly are.  Usually, though, those conversations never happen again, and we’re left as the sole believers in our undiscovered wit.  Really, hindsight and too much free time is a tough combination for everyone.

What’s worse, though, is when those conversations actually do recur, and you never manage to cultivate a comeback. 

As a graduate student studying English Literature, I get asked the same question over and over again (sing it with me fellow liberal arts students): What are you going to do with that?

And, to a point, it’s such a fair question.  Genuine curiosity doesn’t offend me.  It’s the tone, it’s the follow-up questions, it’s the look of distrust and suspicion, as though I’m going to prowl the town with Derridean flair and start systematically dismantling street signs because there is no way they can ever truly represent the signified. (I’ve taken a lot of theory this year)

People don’t really ask me what I want to do with my degree, they ask me why I’m still pursuing an education, and there are a few thoughts implicit -and sometimes explicit- in this inquiry:

Why are you shirking your responsibility to be useful in society?  What are you afraid of in the “real world”?  Why are you wasting your time/money/ heretofore undiscovered musical talent and/or modeling potential?  OK, no one ever asks me about the last one, but I won’t pretend to know for sure that’s not what some people are wondering.

And I never know what to say.  I always smile politely, reply with something benign and meaningless, then toy with saying, “You are not worth another word, else I’d call you knave,” but quoting Shakespeare at people in this situation seems sort of counterproductive.

However, I recently finished my first year of graduate school, and I’ve been pushing myself to really explore the symbiotic relationship between Academia and small town life.  I think even if a foray into Foucault wouldn’t interest a lot of people who were not sitting through a theory class (and, to be fair, a lot of people who are sitting in a theory class), there are still a few things I’ve learned from my first year as a graduate student that transfer to life outside of Academia.

Work while confused.  Try to work through your confusion, and, if you can’t, learn to use your confusion.

This is where I admit that I totally understand why people think literary theory is ridiculous.  Sometimes you read sentences that are half a page long.  People make up the craziest words, and you’re just supposed to go along with it.  And then you have the theorists who tell you that words don’t really provide stable meaning anyway, so good luck ever knowing what anyone is talking about.  I spent about 50% of my time confused this year, and there was many a moment when I considered throwing text books across the room, but, alas, they were generally too heavy. 

The secret to making it past those moments of frustration is, perhaps, just accepting them.  Yeah, someone’s making something up right now, and, OK, this person could probably make an effort to be clearer, but maybe something this person is saying could add to your life.  You could actually walk away being more than you were before you started participating in this exchange (because, never doubt, it is an exchange). And if, at the end of the sharing you’re still confused, look at what’s confusing you and make sure that you communicate your own ideas in a more efficient manner than what you just witnessed.  It’s OK to not understand.  It’s never OK to shut down because you don’t understand.

Be around people who get you, and also be around people who don’t.

I first really clicked with one of my friends in the program because we’d both earned a B on the same, minor essay, and were disproportionately angst-ridden about it. Even though we ended up having more in common than our unrealistic academic standards, I still get a lot of comfort from having a person around who knows where I’m coming from when I scowl at a 19/20, because I really was aiming for that 100%.

I also have a few friends in the program who will unabashedly tell me to chill the hell out and watch a movie or get a drink.

In life, you need people who will reinforce your drive and understand your slightly neurotic tendencies – you need those people who will assure you that you aren’t crazy.  You also need those people who will tell you that you are definitely crazy.

You do not need to prove that you are the smartest person in the room.

Grad school is very competitive, and even though our program is not as cutthroat as others, there was still occasionally the sort of tension that derives from two or more people heatedly debating an irrelevant point in order to see who would prove themselves Smartest Person Sitting in an Uncomfortable Desk. I’m not sure what you get for winning this award, but if the prize was cookies, I really regret not participating. Next time.

Anyway, really, when we’re so concerned with showing off our intelligence, we tend to tear other people down instead of trying to discern how to add to the conversation before us.  And, you know, sometimes the best way to add to a conversation is to just stay silent.

It’s great to know what you want to do in five years.  It’s necessary to know what you have to do to get through the week.

Things get busy in graduate school.  Things actually get so busy that you start to long for the days when you thought you were busy as an undergraduate.  Adding to the atmosphere of preoccupation (that smells slightly of fear and coffee) is the fact that there’s basically always something you could be doing – another project that needs completing, a paper that needs revising, etc.  Believe me when I say that to-do lists are helpful, but also rather frightening things.  It’s easy to be in the middle of one project, and then accidentally start to think of all of the other projects you may never get to because of old age. 

Despite what you may have surmised based on stories of adrenaline-fueled individuals lifting cars off of children, panic is not conducive to an effective working environment, at least not long-term.  As much as you can, focus on one task at a time, if for no other reason than you will actually experience joy when you finish one thing, instead of anxious dread because you thought you were on a journey to Accomplishment, but you’re really on a treadmill with a carrot dangling in front of you.  And you don’t even know that you particularly like carrots.

Unapologetically spend time doing what you love.

OK, so, after all of that, I still don’t know what to say to people who don’t get my degree, but I do know that my first year as a graduate student has taught me that I don’t need to apologize for the joy and sense of purpose I get from being a part of Academia. 

I truly believe that the world is a better place when we’re doing what we love, if for no other reason than we’re happier. 

As for what it means when I’m saying “better” and “happier,” and who I’m actually talking about when I say “we,” well…Those are questions for some literature students. See how much you need us?