Yesterday at lunch time, I couldn't stay inside - it was too beautiful outside, nearly 70 degrees with a constant steady breeze - so I walked down to the river (two blocks) and chatted with a pal who also works downtown.
Last night, I went out to a debate at the local college featuring Ron Jeremy, the "movie" star. When I got home it was 11 degrees with a windchill of -2.
Gotta love that Midwestern weather!
Is it too harsh to call a former President (and his wife) shady? Yes, I'm contributing to the lowering of political discourse. Hiring back Mr. Fancy-Pants Sandy Berger is enough to indict Hillary on the shady score, but Bill's got plenty of reasons of his own.
Just the same, I'm thinking: Please, Democrats, please put Hillary Clinton on the ticket. Right now that looks to be the only way a Republican is going to win the White House.
And is anyone else slightly nauseated at the idea of the Clintons, seeking to replace the Bush family, are desperately seeking endorsements from the Kennedys? I thought this was America, and there wasn't supposed to be an aristocracy here, but I could be w
If 40 million married Americans, or 20 million women (since the law is what it is), are not having much sex (less than once a month!)…why is it that people think that single men and women in their twenties and thirties who aren't having tons of sex or desperately seeking partnership might be odd…or gay….or asexual? Is perhaps not having much sex the actual default condition/preference for humans, and we've made sex into this artificially-imposed thing to aspire to?
(Via Althouse)
I find the Chuck Norris facts as funny as the next person (including, apparently, Chuck Norris*), but why? Is it that we are so jaded that there can never be a strong, silent hero who is uncomplicatedly good, except to use as campy humor? If John Wayne were alive today, would he be sitting next to an "actual Geico customer" doing those commercials?
But back to Chuck Norris – "invoking Chuck Norris out of context is funny" just seems to be such a given these days that it has seeped into everything. If you play WoW you know what I mean when I say "Barrens chat, anyone?" And then I read this today from James Lileks:
On the other hand: here's a movie called "Shoot 'Em Up," the title of which would seem to indicate a playful jab at the conventions. It features Clive Owen, who is so tough his breakfast cereal has marshmallows shaped like Chuck Norris.
Why did I laugh out loud at that? What is it about Chuck Norris that is so damned funny?! Why am I falling for this??
*Okay, what are your favorite Chuck Norris facts? Mine are:
I'm obviously quite into navel-gazing today, so let's talk some more about my introvert "problem." Today, instead of being at work or engaging in normal adult activities, due to circumstances, I'm sitting at home eating dry cereal out of the bag reading advice columns online. This isn't a problem - many people need a break. Sometimes you're stuck at home waiting for the cable guy, sometimes you indulge by doing so in your pajamas and accomplishing absolutely nothing of worth.
Where I start to diverge from others, I fear, is the fact that I could happily spend the next six months doing just this - sitting in my pajamas, reading the entire internet and eating dry cereal out of the bag. It's both why I long to/am slightly afraid to live alone - I'd never emerge from my home. I can see it in my mind's eye - cozy, welcoming, full of only my stuff, music I like, colors I like, my computer and bookshelves having the most prominent place, the t.v. there for occasional bursts of mindlessness (Have I mentioned I'm totally into Boston Public reruns lately?). I'd never come out. I'd sit in contented silence evening after evening, from the time I got home from work til I turned out the lights (later than I ought to) with my cellphone on silent and logged off the chat programs, just enjoying my solitary pursuits. That's getting a little weird. Now, of course I don't know if it's true - who knows? If I really had six months to sit at home doing nothing, would I do it? Or would I get bored by the fifth day, and start emerging into society again? Only time will tell.
So Myer-Briggs has always told me that I am "INTJ", something which has (I suspect) become even more prevalent lately. But what does that mean for a social life? If you're an introvert, how on earth do you meet new people with whom to construct relationships - business, social, and romantic? It's a quandry.
I was reading Amy Alkon this morning, and got deep into the comments discussing an introvert-extrovert romantic relationship. A commenter wrote:
I have my own definition of "introvert" and I didn't make it up. An introvert is not someone who doesn't like others, but rather, someone who is drained by the effort of being with others. While an extrovert is someone who is energized by being with others.
That's a perfect description of me. I like other people, but I often find it incredibly draining to be with large groups of people, or to go night after night to social engagements with even small groups of people. In that sense, law school was ideal for someone like me: I could spend as much time at school as I wanted to spend, and when I'd had enough social interaction for the day, I could retire to my home with a perfect excuse for not socializing - I'm in law school, I have to study. (Or, I'm stressed and need a break on the couch with the O.C.) Fellow law students tended to understand that manifestation of introversion, either because the law attracts introverts to a greater degree or just because the process of studying law is itself so draining that everyone adopts introvert-type strategies to deal with it all.
Post-law school, it doesn't go over so well with my friends. For one, most of my friends are extreme extroverts. Some of these were pre-law school friends and I found their ideas about the proper arrangement of social calendars much easier to take prior to law school. My theory is that I've always leaned introverted, but that law school fundamentally changed me and I'm now so strongly introverted I may never recover. I just took a Myer-Briggs test online, and the result was that I "distinctively expressed introvert" (whereas I only "moderately expressed" intuitive personality and judging personality, and "slightly expressed" thinking personality).
I could speculate on why I'm different now - law school makes us selfish monsters, law school encourages people to retreat into isolation amongst the "laypeople", three years of being surrounded by other introverts and allowed to indulge my every selfish whim with the defense of "I can't do that because I'm in law school and too busy" has allowed me to fully develop this potential that was already there, the depression common to lawyers. But the fact remains that I am now strongly introverted, and lots of people think that's a weird or bad thing. I could blame it on being thirty and being "done" with the party scene, but to be frank with the exception of a few years in my college fraternity, I was never into the party scene. Commenter Dale really struck a nerve with me when he wrote:
I actually have to plan my social calendar around my introversion knowing that by the end of a long week of interaction I'm usually ready to gut the next person who tries to engage me in idle, pointless chit-chat. Gouging the wrong person's eye can have negative long term dating and business ramifications.
I do that too! I even have to plan it so that "social" weekends are staggered. If I go out of town one weekend, to a gathering or event or whatever, I try to make sure that the following weekend is completely free of engagements so I can "recover." This probably sounds really odd coming from someone who blathers on day and night from a blog, and who spend three years sitting in the patent law library to study because that's where all of my friends gathered. But that's the impulse I have to fight every day when I try to balance maintaining relationships with my own sanity.
The quandry I mentioned earlier is, how to network and build relationships - of all stripes - as an introvert? The only way is by forcing myself to get "out there", although nowadays with the internet it is really a lot easier than it used to be. I have contacts in the legal world I made solely through blogging (alone! in my pajamas! on a Friday night!); friends I socialize with only via different online ventures; even a potential romantic entanglement with a fella I've met online (who claims to be extroverted, but is online nearly every evening...hmm). I thought this advice was the best bit of all:
As an introvert, you all are correct when you realize socializing is "work" for us. However, I have found such work necessary to still be able the call myself human. So, I disagree with those that imply that if you don't enjoy it don't do it. It is important that introverts work on their socializing skills by occasionally getting out. My experience is that I generally enjoy such gatherings as long as they are limited (and alchohol is served ;-)) as it really is "work". I have even made real friends from such adventures! All relationships are about give and take and it is important to "bend" a little to learn about aspects of life that your significant other brings to the party.
Two completely fascinating (though both rather lengthy) articles this week, one in Slate and one in Reason, about the education gap between males and females and effects it may have on our currently male-centered economy. Both articles provide ample reasons as to why the marriage rate has declined and continues to do so.
First, the Reason article, which points out that by 2017 there will be 3 women with college degrees to every 2 men. This has all kinds of economic and sociological implications for society, which the Slate article spells out quite nicely. Consider this:
David Brooks writes:
All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Connerly and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Sommers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners. … Clinton’s fallback position is that neither she nor Obama should be judged as representatives of their out-groups. They should be judged as individuals. But the entire theory of identity politics was that we are not mere individuals. We carry the perspectives of our group consciousness. Our social roles and loyalties are defined by race and gender. It’s a black or female thing. You wouldn’t understand.
Even in this moment of stress, Clinton wants to have it both ways. She wants to be emblematic of her gender and liberated from race and gender politics. As she told Tim Russert on Sunday: “You have a woman running to break the highest and hardest glass ceiling. I don’t think either of us wants to inject race or gender in this campaign. We’re running as individuals.”
I'm delighted to see the "group" "victim" card being turned against its purveyors. For all of us who have had to suffer through identity politics, witnessing accusations of "self-hating" gay men or "race-traitor" Condi Rice, at least we can now be entertained by the fact that their own absurd ideas are biting them on their collective asses. I'm doubly enjoying it as a woman who has been exscorciated for saying I would never vote for Hillary Clinton even in spite of our shared chromosomal experience, and told that I'm a traitor to womanhood and (my favorite) that I'm riding on the sacrifices of all of the women who came before me, so the least I can do is "give back" by voting for a female President. When it comes to choosing a national leader, I'll modify the old Edwin Starr song to explain my perspective on the characteristics I consider:
Gender, huh, good God y'all, what is it good for?
Absolutely nothing! (Say it again!)
