Ask Polly: I Desperately Need Everyone To Like Me!
Appearing here Wednesdays, Turning The Screw provides existential crisis counseling for the faint of heart. "Because it's all been a pack of lies." (Cue drum solo.)
Dear Polly,
This is probably far from an original advice-seeking topic, but I need an original answer. I am a 28-year-old woman who still feels the need to have everyone like me. I mean everyone. People I like, sure, and people whose respect I would like to have, but also people I actively dislike, people I will surely never see again, people I will never see even once in real life. Work people, Internet people, flying purple people, you get the idea. Errybody. I fully understand the insanity and inanity of this, but it seems to be a problem I can't figure my way out of, and the majority of advice I've read/heard amounts to, "Stop caring. Just don't care anymore!" But of course it's not that simple. Reminding myself that I don't even like him anyway or that I'll never have to see her face again does nothing to alleviate my striving for their approval, and it definitely doesn't dull the pain if I don't get that approval. Same goes for other strategies like reminding myself about all the wonderful people that have my back no matter what or adopting a fake-it-til-you-make-it, balls-out, "fuck tha haterz!" attitude.
(For background, I have an idea of where some of this comes from. I was friend-dumped a lot as a kid—particularly by a group of girls who would routinely and arbitrarily decide we weren't friends anymore and ignore me for a few weeks until they graciously forgave me for the nothing that I had done to them. Being a sensitive child, I turned this inward and decided it had definitely been something I did or said that made them temporarily terrorize me, and I felt so grateful and determined to not fuck it up again when they would allow me back into their mean girl clubhouse. But I feel that this only accounts for some of the problem.)
Of course, in the process of trying to be universally liked, I end up losing a lot of myself, agreeing with arguments I don't actually agree with just to be agreeable, putting forth opinions that I in no way hold but sense the other person might approve of, holding my tongue when I should speak up, etc. This feels predictably horrible and gross afterwards, but the sad truth is it doesn't feel as bad to me as being rejected or even just plain un-liked, which I experience as disproportionately unbearable. READ MORE
'Gatsby' Is Really About the Housing Crisis
The Great Gatsby got a modern upgrade last week thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s directing, Leo’s acting, Jay-Z’s soundtrack, and Prada’s costumes, but those aren’t the only reasons the film should resonate with a 2013 audience. Gatsby’s Roaring 20’s lifestyle—full closet, extravagant parties, boats, cars, and especially his mansion—has something to teach us about an era of more recent cultural memory: the Clinton-Bush boom years and the Great Recession that followed.
I’m sure you’ve all seen/read it by now, so you know the gist: (The Great) Jay Gatsby rose from economic obscurity to a life of luxury, defined by his towering house and the raucous parties he throws there. He believed his success would be enough to win back the love he had lost: Daisy Buchanan, who married another while Gatsby fought in the war. But even his gorgeous house wasn’t enough for Gatsby to get what he really wanted.
Fitzgerald might not have known it in 1925, but he was really writing a novel about America’s obsession with real estate. It's common to read The Great Gatsby as Fitzgerald’s attempt to shatter the illusion of the American Dream, but that term, “the American Dream,” wasn’t even used yet at the time Fitzgerald wrote his novel. As an idea, it was clearly a part of the national mindset, and Fitzgerald wanted to tell us something about it. Gatsby is a warning of material obsession, not a celebration of success, and his untimely demise (spoiler alert) seems to cement Fitzgerald’s point: The American Dream is easily mistaken for what it isn’t. There is a long history in this country of confusing the two, and a 2013 audience will surely be reminded of one of our greatest material obsessions resulting in Gatsby-level failure: our houses. Coincidentally, or not, this obsession began just around the time Fitzgerald was writing his novel. READ MORE
Everyone Secretly Hates "Snow Fall"
Cody Brown, of Scrollkit, made a replica of the ballyhooed New York Times "Snow Fall" story—in about an hour. Naturally, the Times made a copyright complaint: he was, after all, using their images and whatnot! So he removed it. Then they insisted that he "remove any reference to the New York Times" from his website. Heh.
He writes:
The backlash to “Snow Fall” is that it’s an indulgence only the Times can afford. It took them six months and a powerful multi-person dev team to hand-code it. Most news orgs don’t have anywhere near these kinds of resources, and this is why we’ve spent the past year creating a tool that opens the ability to produce these stories to significantly more people.
This is a good point, even though we should note that it's in service of promoting his company, and it's not something many people want to say in public. (Update: We want to be clear that, yeah, there was not actually SIX MONTHS of coding. That's way over the top.) Privately, the kvetching about Snow Fall among "media people" has been pretty intense. Each time this topic comes up around journalism profs or reporters, there's a huge amount of eye-rolling. That eye-rolling is always, however, as it should be, preceded by praise: it was great work, it needed to be done, all that jazz. Everyone appreciates the labor; they just don't think it changes everything. There's generally five ideas people bring up. READ MORE
Record Shopping With Carrie Brownstein
You know her as a sketch comedy master on TV. Watch Carrie Brownstein portray one of the many faces of membership from American Express, this time as a vinyl-obsessed shopper. Even as an avid consumer (literally) of records, her character is able to stay within budget thanks to the American Express Prepaid Card, a prepaid card that ensures she won't rack up any overdraft fees.
Learn more about how the American Express Prepaid Card can help you manage your budget.
"Greek yogurt is a booming $2 billion a year industry — and it's producing millions of pounds of waste that industry insiders are scrambling to figure out what to do with."
If you started off your day in a state of depression because of that bear-milking story, hang on:"A bear is wandering through a residential area Wednesday morning in Sun Valley. The bear has been climbing fences and roaming through residences' back yards. The bear surprised two horses as it emerged from one backyard, then walked through another corral with three horses a few blocks away." I am not sure yet how this whole thing will play out, but it has got to end better than "caged bear getting liver drained for medicine." I mean, right? This week has been pretty rough already, I don't know if I can take anything more.
Terrible Region Between Herald and Time Squares Shut Down Due To Alleged Jumper
Gotta jumper next door. Police putting up air bag in case he leaps! Don't do it! twitter.com/bbyrdi/status/…
— Brian Byrd (@bbyrdi) May 22, 2013
Midtown South has a jumper problem. This morning New York commuters found themselves tangled up with an apparent suicide watch, and they reacted in the way New Yorkers do.
Guy a block away from work is a "jumper" or some shit. Shitloads of cops and ambulettes swarming, got inflated thing up.
— S.B. (@ItsNotStephen) May 22, 2013
So, there's a #jumper on the bldg next 2 us. It's almost more disturbing that ppl R watching, taking pictures of the guy & his bouncy castle
— joyabella (@joyabella) May 22, 2013
"When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing? I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your [expletive] bike lanes."
—Anthony Weiner to Mike Bloomberg, June 2, 2010
"Come January 1st, when I am out of office, I am going to destroy your f–king industry."
—Mike Bloomberg to Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman, May 16, 2013
"Go fuck yourself."
—Christine Quinn, lots of times probably
The Decrepit Beauty of Dallas
On a recent walk through downtown Dallas, I stopped to admire an old light fixture attached to an abandoned building. The streets around me, lined with weedy lots and architectural wreckage, were deserted enough to feel vaguely menacing. A car cruised past; its driver and I seemed to regard each other with the same wary suspicion. I returned my attention to the light. “Look at me,” it whispered, defiant and exhausted, “and try to tell me that the old world was not better than the new one.”
I wasn’t so sure, given that whatever good you want to say about the past, the fact remains that it led us to the unfolding misery that is the present. Still, I could appreciate where the light fixture was coming from; its wrought-iron craft resonated with the lost beauty of old things, and it seemed to cling to its arts-and-crafts heritage with a blind tenacity and optimism I found courageous, when so much else in the neighborhood—except for the nearby skyscrapers, which hovered like ambivalent, impenetrable fortresses—had succumbed to the violence of time and neglect. READ MORE
New York City, May 20, 2013
★★★ The morning fog was thick and forbidding, but the pavement was merely damp. The mistrustful kindergartener, preparing to go out the door, could be shown that people were down there without umbrellas. Soon enough, the worst had burned away, leaving only a lingering mist on the river and haze in the streets. By late morning, there were only a few scaly patches of cloud in a blue downtown sky. Motorcycles and bicycles came out; greenery twined in a bike's basket. Below Houston, shorts were out: baggy tourist shorts, short-shorts, culottes, everyone's own idea of ventilation or liberation. Uptown, in the evening rush, people seemed to be mostly still wearing the pants in which they'd gone off to work.
If am somehow conscious while it is happening, I think my first thought when I am about to die will be, "Jesus, finally." But I'm pretty sure my second thought will be, "What an idiot," no matter what the circumstances. Hopefully there won't be time for a third thought.
Talking to Gabe Liedman About A Bunch Of Stuff
Beloved as half of the fantastic comedy duo "Gabe and Jenny" with Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman co-created the amazing New York standup show Big Terrific with Slate and standup Max Silvestri. Though he now lives in LA, I caught up with him in Brooklyn before Big Terrific's fifth anniversary show to talk about his first ever televised standup and the benefit of doing a weekly show.
So how was the taping?
Awesome. It went perfectly. It was really fun and looking back, it just went perfectly. Can't wait to see it. No regrets.
What did doing a Half Hour mean to you?
I guess I've always thought of myself as doing something different than standup. And so when I got to do an album this year, and then a special, it made me feel like part of the community. I guess I always felt like what I was—when I started, I was worried that what I was doing was not standup and now I feel like it's definitely standup. READ MORE
The Best First Sentence Of A Novel This Year (So Far!)
"The summer following the winter that my mother took off into something called Women's Land for what I could only guess would be all eternity, my father decided that there was no choice but for him to quit his despised job and take me and my brother to the beach for at least the entire summer and possibly longer."
—How can you not want to read September Girls since it has one of the great first sentences of all time?
• Indiebound • Amazon • Powell's • Barnes & Noble
"Before I had to be on a flight at least twice a week for work, I’d rather have stared quietly at the seatback in front of me for two hours than muster up the enthusiasm to get anything productive done on an airplane. Now that I’m racking up frequent flyer miles, it’s become a priority for me to treat the tray table as an extension of my office and it isn’t always easy. Here are a few tips to keep you on task, because its way more fun to enjoy happy hour at your destination than it is to finally finish that spreadsheet you’ve been putting off."
How (And Why) My Parents Paid For My College Education
When I was 18, my parents sent me 600 miles away to Northwestern University for a journalism degree worth nearly $200,000. Minus $50,000 in loans and grants, they paid for the whole thing out-of-pocket. I've never understood why. As far as I knew, my family was well-off, but never rich; we had necessities, but rarely luxuries. Why did they spend that much for me to study journalism? For that matter, why and how did they pay for college at all? I put that journalism degree to use and asked them.
Jamie: When did you guys start thinking about college for me and Jennifer?
Mom: Oh, very early. Shortly after you were born.
Dad: You were pretty much a baby, Jamie. We wanted to start putting some money away so that you could afford to go to college.
Mom: I think we did a mutual fund. READ MORE
"A new study suggests that people with left-brain dominance tend to listen to their mobile phones with their right ear, and vice-versa."
The Alien Mysteries of Easter Island
The caption above, selected from a pool of hundreds in the New Yorker's caption contest #378, and then voted to the top of the pile by New Yorker readers, is reasonably witty on the surface, insofar as Cadbury Creme Egg commercials are witty. But like the best satire, this caption works on two very different levels. Masquerading as complete and utter pablum—literally fodder for children—it hints at a violent end to Western Civilization as we know it.
It might be hard to understand why this caption won the contest if you only look at its surface features. The losing captions of this contest's three top choices—"I’m rebranding" and "He’s a temp"—at least address the presence of the other pirate, and incorporate him into the author's temporal interpretations of the scene. In those instances, the pirate on the right, surprised by the bunny on his Captain’s shoulder—where cartoon tradition, if not pirate tradition, would call for a parrot—has clearly asked him, or at least indicated the presence of the question, why there is a bunny on his shoulder. Not only do the Captain’s responses incorporate a proper dose of New York-style ennui, and the ironic use of corporatespeak to evoke it, they have a sense of timing. In both the losing captions, something has happened before we entered.
But, then again: has it? Upon further inspection, little action has taken place, because the authors of the losing captions have merely made the second pirate into a "bridge" character for themselves—they are surprised at the bunny, therefore he is surprised at the bunny, and therefore all the Captain can do is offer explanations for it. By creating a universe wherein the Captain’s bunny is not actually surprising—or at least by muffling this impulse—the winning entrant, Bucknell Webb, has actually outdone the competition, though it required making a caption that is comparatively static. READ MORE
IRL Dating Tips From A Bartender
Anyone who's alone at a bar fidgeting, smiling then not smiling, glancing at a phone screen, over and over — and over — is often on the verge of meeting a wonderful stranger. A wonderful stranger who fits some essential criteria on a website. One of the few and true delights I’ve found as a bartender is watching the online date unfold. It’s like watching a rom-com except you actually never know how it’s going to end.
I love it when I hear things like:
“Just so you know, I have a terrible headache. I can totally sit here with you, but my focus might be off. It’s NOT that I’m not intrigued, it’s that I’m hurting.”
Or:
"I’m mainly interested in Asia, that’s my favorite country, I mean continent, my favorite continent that I’ve been to, my favorite continent that I’ve been to that I liked. I would go to another continent though. If there was a problem and I was required or whatever.”
Intoxicating dialogue aside, I’ve noticed some basic patterns. These advisements, you should note, are created by an observer. I’m too cowardly to meet someone online. Consequently, I view all of you with great respect and awe, as I would a surgeon, Navy Seal, or vegan.
Additionally, it’s hard to mention the central protagonist, DATER #1, as well as the other person who shows up, DATER #2, without using gender-specific pronouns at times. My hand being forced, I’ve loosely designated the protagonist as a female and the other person who shows up as male. Still, no matter what the inclination, the general idea remains the same.
1. If you arrive first, try not to primp too much while you wait. You already did this at home. You already did this on the way there: in the reflection of subway window or in a rearview mirror or in your office bathroom. In particular, the barroom mirror is a woman’s curse. Most men can refrain from looking but women are seemingly mesmerized. Usually there are a lot of adjustments. Hair is fluffed, a duckbill pout emerges. Eyes grow larger, sultrier. The vibe is murderous yet intelligent. Or simply put: fucking nuts. READ MORE
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