Beer Pong Herpes

My mid-term exams contained objective portions that allowed me to grade with other media playing in the background, thus the earlier CBS news post. From there, I moved on to more serious news sources and stories like the one below. I frequently give people a hard time who forward things to me without first exercising some due diligence. This piece is about what happens when news "professionals" are guilty of the same thing. It's four minutes long, but worth it. Clear out some space because you're likely to be ROTFL.

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He's Just Not That Into You

It's Valentine's Day. My Valentine and I celebrated by picking up burgers and fries at Five Guys in Cumming, Georgia, (I swear--it's the name of the town--I'm not making it up) and driving out to the base of Buford Dam to eat them sitting on the tailgate of the Jeep, watching the ducks bobbing for lunch, and the fly fishermen killing time while Etta James crooned from the stereo.

But this post is really about what came next. By now, those of you who are regular reviewers here should know enough to know whether or not to trust my taste in movies. Mostly, I'll just comment on whether a movie is worth your ten bucks and two hours or not. But occasionally, I'll feel strongly enough about one to actually say that you shouldn't miss it. Reign Over Me was like that. So was Once. At the other end of the spectrum was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which is the only movie I can remember seeing in the last decade that made me seriously want to kill myself.

Today's topic is in the first category, the do not miss this category. After a pseudo-picnic--the best we could do for a cloudy February day in North Georgia--we went to a movie.

Don Anderson likes to say that the measure of good writing is when you say, "I wish I'd written that." Well, this movie passes that test with flying colors. Great acting, great casting, and possibly the best script of its sort that I've ever seen. They so nailed it. All of it. Any book or film would be doing well to tackle the dynamics of any of the relationships in this movie and do it with fidelity to life. To tackle them all--the singles that don't want to be, the players, the committed unmarried, the faithful married and the cheating spouse, the mistress, the uninterested, the interested only for sex, the used and cast off, the list goes on. It would be an ambitious project just to sit around one night with friends and try to list all the various roles one might encounter in the world of relationships one decade into the 21st century. Listing them would be ambitious enough. To work them all into a single movie would seem over-ambitious. To work them all into a single movie with the honesty and fidelity which this movie does is, from my point of view, the work of gods and goddesses. It's based on the book by the same title

It is like Shakespeare's As You Like It, in that the right couples end up together in the end, and the right people end up . . . alone. It is better than entertaining. It's real. It's true. It's cathartic. It's the movie I'm most likely to remember from this year. It's the one, like Once and Reign Over Me, that I'd be willing to offer a money-back guarantee on. See it with someone you love or someone you want to love. See it with your best friend. Whoever you are, you will see people in it that you recognize, and you will be amazed at how well they capture them, their motivations, their emotions, their souls.

Grade: A+

2007 Word of the Year

An AP article in today's paper, in what seems an appropriate bookend to last week's announcement of banished words for 2008, announced the American Dialect Society's selection for 2007 Word of the Year: "Subprime."

Of course, the thing that I found most interesting about the AP article itself was that it didn't make it past the second sentence without using one of the words from last week's roster of the banished:

The group of wordsmiths chose “subprime” as 2007’s Word of the Year at its annual convention Friday.

That had to be intentional.

Also worth perusing is the list of nominees for word of the year. Especially useful to me, from the category of "Most Unnecessary" was Vegansexual: "A person who eats no meat, uses no animal-derived goods, and who prefers not to have sex with non-vegans." And I now understand how I, my unashamedly omnivorous self, became unnecessary.

"He who laughs, lasts." --from The Chaplain's Guide to Surviving Basic Cadet Training (1977).

Recurring Training

In the Air Force, there's a long list of recurring training items that we have to check off every year. The CSAF recently promised to get rid of much of it--I mean what's the likelihood that we'll forget from year to year that you shouldn't sell secrets to anyone or use your government computer (or any computer) to help the former Ethiopian finance minister get his $100K to the US for a nice 20% cut--but I haven't seen any of it go away yet. Among those computer-based training (CBT) modules is an annual lesson in why it's bad to trade people as a commodity, how to recognize the signs that it's happening, and what to do when you suspect it. It's called Trafficking in Humans.

Here's a suggestion: instead of blithely clicking the next button until the digital drudgery is over this year, why don't we all watch Eastern Promises instead. You can argue that this is a crime drama, a modern Godfather, or a suspense film. You could argue that it's simply a vehicle to display the fairly prodigious acting talents of Viggo Mortensen and others. But, at its core, the engine that drives this train is human trafficking. It's not so much a movie about that sad trade, in the way that, say, Blow, is about the cocaine trade; rather, Eastern Promises is a movie about that trade in the way that Reign Over Me is about 9/11. The flesh of either story has a life of its own, but beneath each, giving either film birth and form are the events without which the story couldn't exist. Each is about not the mechanics of that skeleton, but the costs. And those costs, if you can make them real, will do more to motivate all of us to see, prevent, and intervene than all the CBT reminders of international law and DoD regulations can hope to.

And one last thing: it's a damned good film to boot. I'd give it an A-.

Follow Up: Michelle Manhart

Back in the middle of January, I had a short post about the former AF sergeant turned Playboy model, Michelle Manhart (not her real name).

Here's a little video update, from Military Times.

Ron Jeremy Does Colorado College

I attended that debate tonight with a friend from our English department. We made a little bet earlier about what the demographics of the audience would be. He thought more men; I thought more women. The debate over porn is frequently cast as a women's issue, I figured. In the end, it was about even. The house was packed. I attended a talk by Michael Pollan in this same chapel back in February that had only half so large a crowd. Tonight's was overflowing. Chairs outside on the lawn and speakers to pipe the debate out to them. Folks all along the walls.

I've not enough time tonight to sum up the evening. Suffice it to say it was interesting. Instead, I'll offer the saddest thing I heard and the funniest. And I'll point out that, oddly, when the time came for questions, it was the men who thanked Craig Gross (whose anti-porn site is here) and took Ron Jeremy to task; and it was the women who thanked Ron Jeremy and took Craig Gross to task. That, I did not expect.

Saddest thing I heard: Ron Jeremy responding to whether he's ever been in an intimate relationship (meaning romantic). "I've made love five times in my life. I've had sex considerably more."

Funniest thing I heard: A female questioner wanting to know if Jeremy thought he could be in a long term relationship with just one person (i.e., monogamous). "Could you ever see yourself in a long term monotonous relationship." "No, and that's why."

He did qualify that though, to point out that there is such a thing as emotional monogamy, and that, he does believe in.

Boys & Girls & Minefields

I recently reconnected with a longtime friend, but one with whom I'd lost touch. We were (or seemed, we're both now learning) more comfortable around one another than any other two people I know of opposite gender who find one another attractive. We were remarkably capable of interacting on, and moving fluidly through, a full spectrum of relationship levels without the usual stripping of mental/emotional gears, and subsequent stagnation at one level or another, that usually takes place in such inter-gender friendships. It has taken us a quarter-century to learn that neither of us was as nonchalant as we seemed to the other. That shouldn't be surprising. But the most remarkable thing about that, is that whatever trepidation we might either have felt at each beginning or shift in levels, the appearance of calm and comfort at the outset of each became reality with astonishing rapidity. That is, the successful concealment of gastrointestinal butterflies became their effectual banishment.

That learning though, that all was not as it initially appeared so long ago, has led us both to a better understanding of what our own children now face as they enter the frightening world of dating. From a mother's perspective, that realization reads like this:

Too often, perhaps we don't realize that the male partner in [a] relationship might be feeling a little insecure or completely intimidated as well. I have always, because of my own insecurities, assumed the complete comfort level of the guy. It is nice to realize now (through someone who should know how guys can feel) that my sons will be nervous, perhaps feel in over their heads, in deep water, etc. in their relationships sometimes. It sounds idiotic for me not to have been acutely aware of that, but they often seem so "overly-confident" now, that I forgot to realize that this may not be the case, and especially in matters of the heart.

It was that remark about sons seeming "so 'overly-confident'" that got me thinking about how the whole dynamic works. So, being a teacher, and firmly believing that the most effective instruction usually involves analogies (because it enables us to move from the old known to the new concept with more ease), my mind started making analogies as I read the message above. (That they are military analogies should come as no surprise to anyone. It is no accident that one of the best known cliches of all time firmly yokes love and war in relation to fairness.)

Here is the conclusion I reached: Relationships are like minefields, at least when we're young. No matter our sex, they are minefields pure and simple. Step wrongly, and you might not lose a leg from the knee down, but you'll sure lose your self-esteem. At the time, that seems even worse. So, we see them the same, whether we're a boy or a girl, but we react differently. That's where the hormones and hardwiring come in. (And that I can write a phrase like "hormones and hardwiring," in all seriousness and without reservation, hesitation, or guilt, goes a long way to explain why "politically correct" is a phrase seldom uttered in connection with my name.)

Women step carefully, gingerly, more slowly, but apparently methodically, because you're nervous and a little frightened about where to step next, but you believe it's probably worth the risk to get to the other side. Men watch that and mistake that deliberation for confidence and poise. It looks to us as though you know where to step next, know where you're going.

Men--because our dominant hormone is testosterone, and its dominant manifestation is action dammit!--run. We run, full tilt, across the minefield, with apparent abandon, because we're nervous and a little frightened and have little idea where to step next, but like you, believe it's probably worth the risk to get to the other side, and since we don't know where to step, one footfall is as risky as the next, and the faster we run, the more quickly it'll be over, dammit, whatever the result. Women watch that and mistake our speed for courage or confidence or both. It looks to you as though either the minefield doesn't concern us in the least (which leaves us open to accusations of insensitivity more often than courage), or else we know exactly where we're going and where to step in order to get there.

There are exceptions, of course. Any generalization invites exception. There are some confident men and women. And there are some men and women who recognize masculine bravado and feminine deliberateness for the charades they are. But I think, in general, the description above is useful in explaining both our sameness and our difference, on the very broad scale. Thus, like any generalization, it is useful only so long as you remember it is just that, a generalization.

Jerry Springer U.

One more reason why dating between Carolina and State students is a bad idea. I'm sad to say my Tar Heel boy comes off looking the worst between these two.

Jerry Springer U.
Even in this era of students posting intimate details of their lives online and in a season when students have shown no shame about posting photographs of offensive parties online, “The Pit Breakup” stands out:

Ryan Burke, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, invites his girlfriend from North Carolina State University to meet him at the Pit, a central meeting point on his campus, for a Valentine’s Day surprise. She arrives and finds hundreds of students (some estimates top 1,000) whom he had invited via Facebook. Her boyfriend starts by introducing an a cappella group — not to sing some romantic melody, but the Dixie Chicks’ defiant hit “I’m Not Ready to Make Nice.”

When the song is done, Burke tells his girlfriend that she has been unfaithful and that he’s dumping her. They exchange harsh words — several of them four-letter epithets — while the audience watches, laughs and jeers. At one point, the crowd starts chanting “slut, slut, slut” at the woman. She fights back (verbally), telling her by-then-ex that if he needs an audience to break up with her, he must have the problem. Many of those watching have cameras and are filming throughout, and numerous videos quickly end up on YouTube, where in less than two weeks they have attracted more than 500,000 viewers — along with parody videos, Facebook groups pro and con, and much debate.

More at Inside Higher Ed, Jerry Springer U

Humpday

If you've ever wondered why Indexed is in my blogroll, it's because it's better than Doonesbury. Just as insightful, but funnier. Here's a great example for Valentine's Day.

(The) Gender (and) Gap

Valentine's Day approacheth. As it does, there's plenty of advice out there on how to get it right, or wrong.

An article on the worst gifts seemed only partially right to me. I like beer, but I might like chocolate just as much. Ever since reading Generation X, around 1990, I've occasionally referred to myself as a lesbian trapped in a man's body. (For some reason, the lesbians I've known have never been amused. Unapologetically heterosexual and married to a beautiful woman, I sometimes feel like their prime candidate for the anti-Christ.)

There was also an article on the right gifts to give. That one came closer to right on.

My favorite from the past week though, at least so far as pointing out the differences between men and women, had to do with clothing. An article on Reuters about women and clothing said:

Sixty-one percent of women polled said it would be worse to lose their favorite article of clothing than give up sex for a month.

Could there be any better illustration of the difference between men and women? Ninety-nine percent of the men I know would give up any article of clothing you asked for rather than give up sex for a month. If you could guarantee them sex every night for a month, they might tell you to help yourself to the entire closet.