Swimming Mainstream

I’m not esoteric. Nor exotic. I’m not particularly cool. I listen to Top 40. I like blockbusters. I only go to plays I have heard of. Musicals typically, and if I know all the songs already--perfect! My favorite restaurants—Il Fornaio, Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion, CPK, In&Out-- are all chains. Sure I like to try new places. I’ll go to Coachella or the odd indie film. But when I am looking for comfort, I go with the masses.

My mainstream-ness was uncovered at NYU, at my individual study school orientation. All of us free-thinking newcomers, all too unique to fit into a school with a label like "English" or "Business" or "Social Work" were supposed to all be different. That was the whole point.

Or so I thought.

In a butter-colored, tweed, J.Crew golf hat, a distressed, short Abercrombie jean skirt and an over-sized light grey sweater, I already stood out in the ring of black and ironically-sloganed t-shirts. As we went around, telling our chosen areas of expertise, I noticed that mine was very unusual. And not in a good way. “Discovery of trauma through rhythmic dance,” one guy said. “The effect of trees on the emotional spectrum,” said a girl. I was suddenly Elle Woods.

“And what are you studying?” the director of the program asked me.

I just wanted to write a novel about sex, men, and the magazine industry. Incorporate a little feminist theory, but make it marketable. Chick Lit, with more brains. But not too much. I didn’t want to be poor.

“Um, well,” I stammered. I don’t stammer. I swallowed and put on my best artsy-face. “I’m looking at the female novel and the dichotomy between feminism and the male gaze in terms of character development.” I hoped it was Foucault-ish enough for these people. This was the first time I felt so out of place. So weird. Like being mainstream was counter-culture.

Needless to say I couldn’t stand being in a program where I knew I was surrounded by people who used big words to make themselves feel smart and would have made fun of me for going to a Spice Girls concert or still listening to Britney Spears. People who looked down on me for working at People magazine. "Hello? I interviewed Oprah," I wanted to say. "I have clips in a national magazine!" But I didn't brag. I just smiled and nodded, tried to be invisible. How was I supposed to be myself when they thought I should be like them? Plus there were no writing classes. Awesome. I left after the first year.

Then, in lecture today, I was reminded of this feeling as the T.A.s introduced themselves and their research. One was studying hostile forms of speech, and the other was focusing on the physiological and psychological effects of abused adolescents.

I’m writing a non-fiction book about marriage mania and a fictionalized memoir about trying to be a slut in college. Mainstream again. Can't get a break!

Its not really a big deal, I guess, but sometimes I feel like I am exceedingly less intelligent for being part of the herd. Or maybe I’m smarter because I won’t be homeless. At least I know what I like, I suppose. It just happens to be what everyone else does.

Brides-to-Be Haunt the Queen Mary

Here is the little film I put together after attending my first bridal show with Jenn.

Don't worry, we aren't really "Brides-to-Be." Just doing a little undercover research for my thesis/book. The footage is mostly from the "fashion show" that was put on during the event.

Needless to say, we left terrified. Enjoy!

Sisterhood

My stepsister and I are about to be related in yet another way—after a week of rush, she received a bid from my sorority.

L and I have known each other since she was eight and I fourteen, when our parents quickly decided to blend our families. A couple summers ago, the three of them—-my dad, my stepmom, and L--moved to Georgia . At this time, I was half-way through undergrad at USC, and as the years passed L and I gradually grew apart. When I visit now we barely speak--let alone do the things we used to despite the six-year age difference: check out the Mall of Georgia, sing to funny songs the radio, swap gossip about her high school life and my college one.

Our parents’ tumultuous relationship likely has much to do with our growing apart, or at least I tell myself this. It’s better than believing I failed her as a sister or she simply doesn’t want anything to do with me. Either way, I don’t think it helps when one’s step-family has been created, destroyed and then formed again twice in less than a decade. The bad-mouthing, swearing-off, and seeing other people that transpired certainly didn’t help things. Nor did the cross-country move.

But today, I feel like things will change.

The bonds of sisterhood I felt at USC were elastic—I felt closer to some sisters more than others at certain times. Being roommates, dorm-mates, or simply growing apart accounted for this. Now, I could count on one hand the sisters I still speak to regularly. (And I only say regularly because Facebook and email qualify as speaking. Though, just to note, I do have dear friends who just happen to also be my sorority sisters--I am more referring to the majority, who I rarely have contact with.) Because I entered sorority life already having three non-blood sisters—my best friends—I didn’t immerse myself into it the way others did.

Today, I feel like I have a second chance at sisterhood. I get to relive my own sorority experience through L. While I can’t say that I engage in regular coffee dates with my sisters now that we live outside the walls of our house, the special meanings and secrecy of being in a sorority still mean a lot to me. They mean even more to me now that I get to share these with L.

In a more meaningful way, I get to start over from scratch on the sisterhood front. While I don’t know if though this new bond L and I will regain the closeness we once had, or if things will stay the same save simple acknowledgment that we share a house—I am excited for the chance to be a sister to her without the darkness of our parents’ past mistakes hanging over us.

Edward Cullen: The New Prince Eric?

As young girls, we watched Prince Eric fall in love with Ariel despite her quirky tendencies to brush her hair with forks and wear rope-and-sail dresses designed by seagulls. He didn’t even care that she couldn’t tell him her own name, let alone speak at all.

Prince Eric has always been my favorite Disney prince. He was better looking than the blander Prince Charmings of Cinderella and Snow White with his silky wind-blown black hair, the brawny chest and shoulders. Eric had a love for his furry dog and adventure, and an aversion to stone carvings of himself. Most importantly, he was willing to go to the depths of the ocean (literally) to fight for the woman he loved.

After reading the Twilight series, and falling seriously in love with its leading man, Edward Cullen, I couldn’t help but wonder: Does Edward challenge our pre-formed notions of Prince Charming? Or is he simply an updated model?

Prince Eric saved Ariel from the clutches of an overprotective father and a life she was bored with. He charmed her with good looks and enticed her with dreams of being a princess, a human princess. By contrast, Bella Swan falls in love with Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, and is decidedly willing to give up her status as a human, and her family, to spend an eternity with the man she cannot live without. Other than that, she is much like Ariel. Bella feels out of her element in the world she is born into: she mothers her own mother, falls down a lot, and generally feels awkward in social situations, especially if they involve dancing.

Somehow, Edward is worth it, to Bella and to us, for her to act traditionally as a damsel-in-distress and allow herself to be saved by him. Why?

Edward will live, and love, forever. He is willing to watch Bella grow old, much to her chagrin, rather than change her into the monster he believes he is. He is willing to give her up, even to Jacob, if that is what Bella wants. His only desire in life is to protect her and make her happy, without taking into account his feelings. He is a selfless vampire, never considering himself a 'catch.'

While Prince Eric is swayed in his devotion by a spell (and nearly married Ursula, casting Ariel off like an old Band-Aid when a speaking version of her shows up), Edward’s love for Bella is literally eternal. Even when he leaves her, he does it out of love. Even the darkest magic can’t break this love-- after all, isn’t Edward a bit of dark magic himself? He is both good and bad. Salvation and danger. An angel and a demon. And while he is technically 17--which makes me feel a little odd to be 24 and infatuated with him-- Edward is timeless. And complicated.

Unlike Eric, Edward is messy, mysterious. Edward is beautiful enough for us to swoon over him, but self-conscious enough about his non-human state that we (and Bella) want to comfort him. He feeds our curiosity enough to entice us, then eases our doubts with his literally undying love for Bella.

Ultimately, we want Bella and Edward to be happy, not wanting him for our own. Instead, we wish to find that unconditional love in our lives, or appreciate the love we are given a bit more because of him. In honor of him. We want to allow ourselves to feel the way he makes Bella feel and, somehow, their impossible situation gives us hope.

SATC: Fairytale or Cold Hard Facts?

(Photo of my NY roomie Krissy and I with New York's finest, Halloween 2006.)

When I was living in New York, I turned to the put-together gals of Sex and the City to take my mind off moving 3,000 miles from my comfort zone. I thought I could channel some of that New York sparkle into my own life. My roommate and I would watch re-runs each night at 11 p.m., and Samantha, the most adventurous of the bunch, was my favorite. She was wild, free, exciting—everything I’ve decided I’m not.

As we continued watching night after night I found that instead of being progressive pop culture fixtures, the SATC women soon started to resemble Ariel and the rest of the Disney princesses more than the fabulously free women I remembered them as.

At the beginning of the series, the main character Carrie compels her pals Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha to “date like men,” i.e. sleep around without getting attached. When I was 19/20, watching SATC squeezed in with my sorority sisters on our houses overstuffed peach couches, I envied these women. They had great jobs, great clothes, and tons of sex. Good sex. Not the kind I was having at the fraternity down the street. Even then, they didn’t need anyone, least of all a man, to make their lives happy. They had the Rabbit if all else failed.

Yet, watching again at the wise old age of 23/24, I started picking up on something different. I realized I had been duped. Being single wasn’t fun. Being in New York (as I learned firsthand) wasn’t that easy. Once I got past the Manolos and Cosmos, I saw a different side of thirty. Turns out that the show’s star Sarah Jessica Parker knew she was fooling us young women. We watched the show in our late teens and early twenties with so much hope in our eyes, yearning for nothing more in life than a shoe-filled closet and endless amounts of lunch dates with friends, not yet worrying about old-fashioned ideas like marriage. Parker told Time magazine in 2007 that she tells her pals, “how boring married life is and how much luckier they are to have freedom and fun.” But, according to the happily married Parker, “It’s [really] just a fun thing to say to make single people feel better.”

And as they say, life imitates art. Marriage, I came to see, was the most talked about goal on SATC, not retaining the carefree single life or becoming a power-player in the office. Of course Samantha was on hand to provide some much-needed crassness, but I would say that Charlotte more than balanced her out. Miranda points out their lopsided goals in one episode, snapping at her friends, "How does it happen that such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends?" but this query is never really answered. The show, while in some ways progressive, stopped far short of throwing marriage out at the end goal of a woman’s life.

Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People wrote in The Guardian in 2008, as part of an article of male opinions about the show, that old-fashioned ideals are disguised as freedom on SATC with chic accessories. Young said, “forcing your feet into a pair of six-inch heels as you tramp from one singles bar to the next is not a form of torture that these women are forced to endure in order to attract a husband; rather, it is a post-feminist 'choice'.” Meaning, these women make desperation look good. Young notes that under a superficial veil of couture, women are, “expected to use their youth and beauty as commodities in order to secure their economic wellbeing. [The show] conceals its brutality behind a veneer of cocktails and laughter. In reality, female friendship is the first thing to be sacrificed in the cut-throat competition for rich husbands.”
At it’s core, the show I thought was most advocating carefree lifestyles for women boils down to: yes you should have that freedom, but not for too long. We all have to grow up, eventually. And stop being selfish. That we must grow up. Ew.

When I learned this, I got a little scared. It didn’t help that, while I was religiously re-watching the show through more “mature” eyes, I was not only unsure of the future of my relationship with James, I was also sharing a dingy studio and schlepping it on the subway each day in shoes I bought at the Astor Place K-Mart--a far cry from the West Village, Manolo-wearing glamourpusses I had first seen on screen.

The more I watched, even with their Manolos, I started to feel a little sorry for the fab four, how desperate they were. More than that, I felt for them. I knew what it was like to wonder when I would get engaged, crabby when people keep asking me the answer to something that should be personal, but isn’t. Most of all, I knew I didn’t want to end up sad and alone wondering if my hypothetical Mr. Big was ever going to commit.

Luckily, it turns out okay for the SATC gals. By the series finale, Charlotte is married, Miranda is about to be, and Carrie and Samantha find soul mates, both of whom we assume they will eventually tie the knot with. (And even in the SATC movie, only Samantha ends up staying single, and her breaking point in her relationship with her boyfriend Smith came after she started gaining weight. Put two and two together and it’s still not a progressive message!) Just as in those infamous Disney movies, the happy-ever-ending is when a ring is on your finger and your marital status is presumably set for life.

Sleepover Gave Me Nightmares

I went to J’s Saturday night for a little girl hang out time with her and her roommate. Naturally, as three mature 24-year-old young professionals we rented Sydney White and Sleepover and watched them, rapt with amusement, as we noshed on Ameeci’s pizza.

Sydney White was everything I hoped it would be: funny but a little stupid, cute but completely cheesy, predictable but unrealistic. It was Sleepover that surprised me…

Some aspects of sleepovers haven’t changed for the younger generation. In the film, the girls apply Hand Candy nail polish and bop around to the Spice Girls, much like J and I did as middle-schoolers. What are considered idealized sleepover activities, as well as the chosen vocabulary, have changed. Drastically. (This choice line made me gag: “Oh for the love of carbs…!”)

My friends and I certainly didn’t drool over high school guys and then kiss them, as the main character, Julie Corky, does in the film. We would never tell our fat friends they were in fact fat, at least not to their faces. And we certainly wouldn’t be perusing a dating website for “grown-ups” and then sneak into a club to meet a guy who responded to our fake profile. And even if that resource was available to us (we only had AIM in middle school), I’m guessing we would be totally creeped out when we saw it was our teacher who responded. We wouldn't fawn over him and then try and make him look cuter by loosening his tie and running our fingers through his hair as the girls in the film did.

The movie, at its core, was all about conforming to the social norms of high school in order to be liked by your peers. Which is something most adolescents do in order to survive. But the ways the movie glorified fitting in sends a scary message to its viewers.

First things first. Maybe I was completely sheltered, but I NEVER hooked up with a high school guy while in middle school. I mean, we didn’t even think about doing that. Leonardo DiCaprio was enough for us. I remember someone from our 8th grade class being invited to Homecoming (a popular guy named Bronz), but this was a rarity. Those middle to high school lines were boundaries not to be played with. Granted, in 9th grade, I went out with a much-older guy (3.5 years my senior), but for some reason, that seemed more ok than an 8th grader and a 10th grader getting together, as it was in Sleepover.

The fat friend thing was ridiculous. Yancy (yes, Yancy, not Nancy) is admittedly chubby. She laments this fact to her pals as they steal her parents’ SmartCar and squeeze into its front seat. No matter about being chunky, one of her friends says. She asks Yancy, “Which would you rather have: a celery stick or a brownie?” I’m thinking, ‘Oh this is going to be a great message about eating what you want and not giving a crap if people say you are obese.” Ha. Fat chance. After Yancy replies, “Brownie of course!” (of course) the friend, who is celery stick thin, says, “ Ok, so you just have to find a guy who likes brownies too.” In short, if you are fat, stick with your own kind. And Yancy does just that when, at the end of the movie, a pudgy guy asks her to dance. Yancy asks him is he likes brownies, to which he responds, “Are you kidding? Brownies are a very important food group.”

As for the dating site, in the movie it is called “DateSafe.com” and there are close-up shots of it to show it is predator safe and stuff, in case viewers get any ideas. The girls are challenged by the evil popular squad to create a profile and find a guy that night to meet them in a club they are all too young to get into. When making the profile, the girls create a composite of their ideal girl: A supermodel who likes sewing. She gets a date instantly.

Perhaps the culminating moment of the film for me was when the girls tried to get into the high school prom, without tickets. They weren’t crafty, they walked in the front door and the ringleader, Julie, appealed to the homely girl who was playing bouncer and ticket-collector by insulting her: “You're out here collecting tickets instead of being inside at the dance. You spend your weekends doing extra credit algebra, you play way too much Monopoly with your parents, and you've never eaten anywhere near [the popular kids]. And in 4 years I will be YOU unless I get into that dance.” Instead of smacking her in the face, the girl gets kinda wistfully teary-eyed and tells them to get their butts in there.

Yes, I know this is just a dumb kids’ movie, but I can’t help but wonder how these scenes shape impressionable young girls, who are already insecure, confused, and looking for answers about their bodies, their friends, their popularity, and themselves. Sleepover teachers girls that if they aren’t the popular kids, or don’t sit with them or can’t get a boyfriend (even a fat one will do if that’s all you can manage), they are committing social suicide.

I would prefer young gals to watch Sydney White—a story that glorifies being an outsider to the point of becoming completely unrealistic. The main girl's social skills are embarrassing and she not only gets the cute guy, but she overthrows the pretty, bitchy sorority president. She unites the university with her self-proclaimed dorkiness, getting everyone from football players to queen bees to admit and embrace their nerdy tendencies.

It may be misleading, but least Sydney White gives all the Yancies and other misfits out there hope.