BROOD

Commercials and advertising campaigns are almost always annoying. But every once and a while there comes along a commercial or advertising idea that makes me want to kill everyone including myself, or even, God save us all,  turn off my TV. For example, I’ve had a tough, ongoing struggle to live harmoniously in the same universe with the Arby’s talking oven mitt spokesperson.

But the oven mitt is not, as I long assumed, the essence of all that is wrong in the world. It’s Payless Shoes and their BOGO promotion.

I don’t have a problem with the Payless product. I like the idea of inexpensive shoes. However, a few times a year, perhaps once a season, they have a BOGO sale. What does that mean? It means that, during the BOGO promotion, you can buy a pair of shoes and get another pair of shoes, of equal or lesser value, for half price.

I know what you’re thinking: sounds like a pretty good deal…but why is it called BOGO? I’ll tell you. BOGO is an acronym for Buy One Get One Half Priced. Kind of. Maybe Payless is also paying less for their advertising people, who decided that, unlike most acronyms, their acronym would stop half way through what it actually stood for - cutting out the HALF OFF part of the message? Maybe Payless purchased their acronym during some sort of a Buy Half An Acronym promotion?

No, here’s what probably happened: the Payless advertising group was sitting around a conference room table - unshowered and eating cold Chinese takeout after days of tedious brainstorming. They were exhausted, desperate, and maybe even hallucinating a bit from sleep deprivation. How would they come up with something fresh and catchy for their Buy One Get One Half Priced sale? It was impossible, and the deadline was in an hour.

“Screw it,” the head advertising lady would have finally said, half-heartedly flinging her pen across the table. “Let’s drop the BOGOHP idea and just go with BOGO. I have a family. I have dreams. I am not the monster you see before you.”

And so it was. BOGO is just easier. Bogo could be the name of a cartoon dog that wears human clothes and enjoys puns and walking upright. Bogo could be the name of the exotic island where you took your honeymoon - somewhere with volcanic black sand beaches and swim-up bars. Bogo could be the name of the new wildly fun board game that brings the whole family together, if only for a few hours.

What is Bogohp, on the other hand? Bogohp could be the name of that exchange student your family had your senior year of high school that always picked his nose at the dinner table and at first you thought it was a cultural thing until you met another guy from the same vague Eastern Bloc country Bogoph was from, and he explained that no, they don’t pick their noses at the dinner table, they just drink Vodka.

Bogohp could be the name of the post-post modern art exhibit that you are forced to go see on a first date - and not even a first date with someone you like, but a first date you only agreed to for the combination of the self-esteem boost and the excuse to buy a new dress. It turns out Bogohpism, which all the big critics are calling “an innovative wave of abstract ideas that we totally understand better than laypeople,” looks kind of like that coffee table book you got for your birthday that’s filled with pictures painted by house cats.

Bogohp could be the noise the guy you are on the self-esteem new-dress first date with makes when he gets really excited and also the noise he makes when he blows his nose. A noise which causes you to leave early, maybe even before your free dinner, go to a theater by yourself to see the new romantic comedy/Hilary Duff vehicle, and then return home to sit in the silence of your studio apartment and reevaluate your life.

In short, the BOGO commercial makes me really angry every time it comes on. You can’t just pick and choose the letters you use for your acronym! Sure, you can drop a T for THE or an O for OF but you can’t drop two big, important words! It’s madness!

If I were the head of advertising at Payless Shoes, things would have gone very differently that day in the conference room. In just minutes, I would have erased the brainstorming whiteboard with huge arching swoops and written the acronym BOGOHO (Buy One Get One Half OFF).

And then I would describe my vision for the commercial - the 30-second primetime spot. It would show a high-powered career woman wearing a pair of beautiful high-heeled Payless Shoes, running to catch a taxi. She would turn to the camera and candidly say, “I’m a BOGO HO.” Then it would cut to a mother, wearing a pair of Payless sneakers, playing with her kids on a tire swing. “I’m a BOGO HO,” she would whisper to the camera, maybe winking a little. Then the camera would cut to a chic hipster in Payless flats, tripping along a path with a cute hipster guy. After laughing with the cute guy and kicking up her legs joyously, she looks into the camera and confesses, “I’m a BOGO HO.”

That would make me so much happier.

Over the last few months I’ve been interested in street harassment in New York - how I and other women react to being bothered, catcalled, and touched by men. It all started with this post and continued with this post, where I decided to respond aggressively to harassment.The biggest conclusion I came to, I think, was that you have to be ready for these incidents and have a response ready - if you don’t you’ll be too shocked to do anything (and also, don’t respond aggressively if you are not in a safe position to do so). Of course, I still have a lot of questions - what is the best way to react to someone so that they might understand how they are making you feel? What’s the best way to react to someone so that they might decide not to do it again? What doesn’t egg them on? Why do they do it in the first place?

In any case, on the way home from work on the subway on Friday, I saw something totally new: a drunk woman harassing and inappropriately touching men.  I was sitting directly across from her and got to see her interact with four different men during the ride and it was absolutely fascinating - like a mini-experiment in how men react to street harassment.  

It happened the same way each time a man sat next to her: she started by resting her head on their shoulder. All four men allowed this to happen and didn’t react except to look a bit uncomfortable and confused. Just like I feel when it happens to me, they seemed to be working out in their heads what was happening - was there some other explanation for how the woman was acting?

After this, though, the woman would touch their legs and crotches and make comments about how much they wanted her and what kind of men they were. I won’t go into her colorful language except to say that it was extremely creative and effective and that I might have noted several of her imaginative phrases for utilization my fiction, if I ever decide on a drunk crazy person character.

Two of the men (the two older ones) put up with this behavior longer than I would have guessed - again, maybe they, too were in shock? But, eventually, all four men yelled something loud enough for the entire subway car to hear (these statements varied from “Chill, lady!” to “What the fuck is your problem?” to “Do not touch me or speak to me again!”

Two of the men used physical force - pushing the woman away from them - and, most surprisingly, all four of them stood their ground. No one left the space that they were originally occupying until their stop came. It seemed almost territorial - whereas the first thing I think of doing when someone is bothering me is to get away from their area as soon as possible, the men opted to push her out of their area instead.

The drunk lady, as one might guess, wasn’t especially affected by any of the men’s defenses (the yelling, the pushing, the retorts). Once the man got off the train, she started the whole cycle over with whoever sat next to her. No one else on the train jumped up to help either the men or to confront the woman, but a lot of sudoku puzzles were completed and a lot of paperbacks were read. Although I stopped reading my paperback, I had no idea what to do.

I don’t think we can draw any solid conclusions from what I saw since it was such a small sampling of people - but, as evil as it may be, it sure was interesting to see the tables turned for once.

Although we could make some guesses about men being more apt to aggressively confront something like this (and I should mention that three out of four of the men were bigger than the woman) or about how they are more likely to cause a scene or stand their ground, the thing I was weirdly comforted to see was how bothered they were about being touched and called names. Nobody likes to be treated like that, from the tiniest meekest woman to the burliest, most aggressive dude.

But as far as I can tell, all the efforts I’ve seen from both men and women haven’t really worked. I still think doing something is better than doing nothing, but is anything effective in the long term? The heart of the problem seems to be that you can’t reason with a drunk crazy person. Is anyone who would openly harass a stranger on the subway, man or woman, capable of understanding how they are making other feel? Perhaps not. Is reacting to these people and stadning up for ourselves more for us than for them? I’m not sure. Back to the drawing board, I suppose.

Ever since I posted about a guy bothering me on the train a couple of weeks ago, I have been patiently waiting for my chance to yell at the next guy who bothered me. My chance came yesterday afternoon on my way home from the gym.

The guy who bothered me looked the part - he was wearing a tacky leather jacket, cheap sunglasses, and was about two inches shorter than me. As he walked toward me, he stepped into my path, said, “Hot hot hot!” and then did a thing with his tongue that I think you can only learn at a special school for harassing women on the street.

Unfortunately for this guy, I was ready this time. It took me a couple of seconds to process everything (yes, he was being inappropriate, yes I would indeed do something about it), then I turned around and yelled “HEY!” and walked back up to him and got in his face. “YOU DO NOT DO THAT TO WOMEN. ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?”

Somewhere between HEY and YOU the guy’s entire body language and expression changed. He actually put up his hands  and started slowly walking backwards. Somewhere between FUCKING and IDIOT he turned around and ran.

It was about the most awesome thing ever. It felt great to raise my voice, which I realized was something I simply never do as soon as I did it. It also felt great to utterly shatter this guy’s confidence, at least in relation to doing weird tongue things to women in the street.

I wouldn’t do it in just any circumstances, though: in this case, I was on my very safe and familiar block, 100 yards from my apartment, in the middle of the day. And, as I mentioned, the guy was shorter than me. He also might not have spoken any English besides “Hot hot hot!” But even if that was the case, I think I stated my point in a way that crossed language barriers.

I also wonder if I’m not really just making things worse in the world - is harassing someone who is harassing you solving any problems? Or is it more like a messed up version of Pay It Forward, where every time someone is a jerk to you, you go out of your way to be a jerk to someone else? Should I have just gone all Ghandi on the guy and used more noble tactics than he did to prove my point? I’m not sure what that interaction would even look like, but it might involve fasting.

I think I am convinced, though, that not doing anything is the wrong thing to do. Just as I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am too passive at work, I think that I (and perhaps other women) would rather not cause a fuss than speak up about not being comfortable in more general situations.

Mostly, though, I wish I had said something wittier and more demeaning. Maybe next time.

I don’t know how, but I got through all of high school and college in America without reading a word of Willa Cather. It all worked out for the best though, since ten years ago I would have probably found her work like, totally boring and about farming and the human condition, or whatever.

I picked up My Antonia a few months ago and loved it to bits - to me, nothing beats stories written in ordinary language about ordinary people. Mix in some bleak, sweeping plains, some overtly lesbian action, and, yes, some awesome stuff about the human condition, and I’m happy.

O Pioneers! was written five years after My Antonia and you can pretty much tell. The story, while similar, is a bit more fantastic and formulaic - Cather studied a lot of Henry James early in her life, and you can tell. Everything is a little simpler and more straightforward in this book — the themes are more concrete, the storyline moves forward steadily, and the ending is clear-cut.

Still, though, there is some beautiful, wonderful stuff happening. The flat, blank unrelenting landscape makes for a great setting in that the characters are very much on their own - affected only by the weather and by each other. There’s not much out in Nebraska during this time period besides sod and humanity, and Cather knows how to write about both.

It’s one of those books where you want to underline things, all the time, like this: “There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the save five notes over for thousands of years. The young people, they live so hard. And yet I sometimes envy them.” Or this, on the very next page, about problem with being free: “Freedom so often means one isn’t needed anywhere.”

And throughout so much of the book, I couldn’t help reeling at how ahead of her time Cather seemed: about women, about education, about religion. And, although it can never be confirmed, since she destroyed all of her personal papers before her death, it seems that Cather was one of the first authors to write about gay rights (but do we really need solid proof? Check out her author photo, for goodness sakes!). For example, in O Pioneers! the moral center of the book is an old man named Ivar. Ivar, whose love and understanding of animals makes him integral to the community, is also mostly mad due to a vague temptation of the body that is never named. He always walks barefoot to punish his body for what he is feeling and constantly reads the Bible for comfort - he has sacrificed his freedom to love in order to reach eternal paradise when he dies.

The book, ultimately, is about the constraints of freedom — being constrained in some respects in order to be free in others - and how getting older means choosing which freedoms you can live with best. Too bad I never got the chance to write a five-page high school essay on this.

Yesterday on my way to work, I was late and got on a later train than usual. I was standing next to someone about my age when he reached his leg out and tapped on my foot. I took it as a harmless, run-of-the-mill subway-jostling mistake.

Then it happened again. And again.

The second time it happened, I looked up from my book as if to say, “Seriously?” and he looked back at me like the dictionary definition of simpering. The third time it happened, I walked briskly away to the other end of the subway car. Did he think he was Larry Craig? I thought, laughing at my own topical humor. What did he want out of this interaction? I was totally creeped out.

A few stops later, I had forgotten about him, found a seat, and gotten lost in my book again. Then, though, my knee was nudged and there he was, sitting next to me, leering at me in a disturbing manner - the only way one can leer.

It was at this point that I devised a plan. I was reading a hardcover book and I pinpointed several large strong good Samaritans nearby who would come to my aid. If he did anything else, I told myself, if he touched me again, I would hit him in the face, plea my case to the good Samaritans during a succinct but moving oration, and then they would finish the job I had started with their various thick crime paperbacks. My song would be sang for many, many ages on many, many subway lines.

But there were only two subway stops left and I got away without further incident. And not doing anything during those first FOUR incidents haunted me throughout the day. Should I have hit him with my hard cover after two toe taps? Three? Why do so many people, including me, let these instances of intimidation and sexual harassment slide by?

What if, every time some dude did something of this sort to me, I did something about it — something that would be really embarrassing for him. What if every time some dude shouted at us in the streets, we shouted back - and not just “Fuck yous!”, but clever comebacks that were, at the same time, extremely degrading and self-esteem-lowering? Why do women think the best response to sexual harassment is walking away and not paying attention? Is it because these men just want attention? Even if that’s the case, I don’t think we should let them get away with it. Is it because we’re afraid of what will happen if we do respond?

Of course, this morning on my way to work, I was late again. I got on the train and there he was again - the very same simpering foot tapper. Leering at some other poor girl. Did he do this every morning, with some different girl? Was it part of his morning commute? Was she, too, reading a hard cover? Again, I did nothing.

On my walk from the subway to work, some other guy shouted “good morning!” at me in the bad way, and when I walked by without saying anything or looking at him, he said, “I said, good morning!” and I did nothing again.

Has anyone ever responded to a sexual harassment issue? How did it go for you? Was part of the problem not really knowing it was sexual harassment until after the fact - do these men operate knowing you’ll be too shocked and confused to act?

P.S. If I were going to sexually harass someone, I’d do something WAY cooler than tap their foot and leer at them. How lame.

Recently I’ve been talking to Molly, a friend from college who now lives in Chicago. We share a lot of the same interests (writing, improv, reading, complaining about our jobs) and are in a similar place in our lives. She’s just re-started her blog, Bittersweet, and we thought to share some of our correspondence (this one’s about writing, non-fiction, and the internet), split between our two blogs. You can read the first half at Bittersweet and then come back over here for the second half.

Sarah, speaking of writers, over at Geek Buffet there was a post that quoted Milan Kundera as saying, “One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.” How does the culture of blogging and social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook affect our generation of writers and thinkers? Has the age of universal deafness and incomprehension arrived?

Sarah: Since I moved to New York, everyone I’ve met has claimed to be a writer. Everyone’s working on a novel, everyone’s scribbling in a journal on the train, everyone either went to an MFA program or applied or is going to apply next year. To be honest, I was bothered by it — it doesn’t you feel very special.

But then I started to see past it. Everyone has this idealistic image of what a writer does: they don’t work, they go to book parties and readings and spend their huge advances and smoke cigarettes. But like I mentioned a few weeks ago, I went to a reading recently where a person in the audience said that they were a writer, except that they didn’t write. And she was being serious. It cleared a lot of things up for me.

There won’t be a day when everyone wakes up a writer. Just like there won’t be a day when we all wake up painters or politicians or Martians. I write all day and it isn’t fun, but it’s all I know to do. We don’t go to literary events and we don’t smoke cigarettes and we don’t talk about the novel we’re working on (after work, at lunch,
during work) because we’re embarrassed by this problem we have: writing.

As for being deafened by the sheer volume of people writing words these days, I’ll bring back the painter metaphor. Anyone can cover a canvas in paint, but I will never, ever be able to paint a picture that moves someone. I read an article recently in the New York Times about a woman who found a priceless painting leaning against a dumpster in New York. She said that when she saw it she didn’t want to carry it, didn’t have room for it in her apartment, and she knew it was worthless. But it spoke to her and she couldn’t help but carry that painting home, against all of her logic. We’ll always be able to hear the best, real writing over the din.

(the painting is pictured above, “Tres Personajes” by Rufino Tramayo)

Molly, I’ve just talked about the writing community in New York and how I find writing to ultimately be a solitary and lonely act. What parts of your writing life do you share with a community and which do you keep to yourself? Is being a writer something you can teach, or is it innate?

Molly: Writing is such a strange and contradictory practice, because it isolates you in the very act of reaching out to communicate. We write to share our stories, to add our voices to the global discussion, and yet to do so we must separate ourselves from the world. And not only are you physically apart from people as you sit with your notebook or your computer screen, but you’re also mentally apart; while the rest of your friends are laughing over beers together, you’re planning your next essay or story in your head. It can be incredibly lonely.

I’m currently taking a writing workshop through Story Studio Chicago, which has been a great experience simply for the opportunity to talk with other writers about all the boring writerly questions that don’t interest my friends and family very much. It’s been interesting, too, workshopping the first chapters of my new novel with them, when with my first novel maybe one person got to see it before I had a working second or third draft of the entire manuscript. Recently, I’ve been lucky enough to find a few fantastic people willing to read my work and give me incredibly thoughtful, detailed feedback about that. So I do feel that I’ve created a good little community of support and critique for myself, but it took me a long time to do so. I spent a lot of time writing in the dark, writing by and for myself, and I think that was just as critical as the community is now.

As for whether being a writer is something you can teach, yes and no. I think you can absolutely teach techniques and ways to focus your writing, ways to strengthen it, to sharpen it. In my writing group, I’m seeing a lot of manuscripts that could benefit from attention to some very simple elements: setting, dialogue, pacing… things easily covered in a class.

However, what can’t be taught, I think, is the sheer will - the need - to write. Can you be taught to keep going after a million rejections? Can you be taught to ignore the people who laugh at you or tell you to grow up and get a real job? Can you be taught to - after any success or failure, no matter how small or large - come home and set the pen once more to the page? Probably not. It’s a cliché, but I really can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer unless some deep, hidden part of them tells them that they have no choice. That they must.

Whenever I put on makeup, I feel like a seven-year-old girl rummaging through her mother’s things - I have no idea what I’m doing, my entire feet have slid down into the toes of her high heels, I’m one step away from smearing lipstick all over my cheeks or eating the mascara.

My cannon of knowledge of the subject of makeup application is pieced together from dog-eared waiting room copies of Cosmopolitans, senior prom, watching women on the train, and the half-dozen times my friends have tried and failed to make me over during junior high sleepovers. My makeup bag consists of presents my aunt gave me a few years ago at Christmas (very subtle hints) and  that time a few years ago when I dressed up as a gypsy for Halloween (non-sexy, people).

I probably wear the stuff a few times a month. Mascara, lip gloss (I think), eyeliner, roll-on eye shadow (or something) and foundation or conceal or liquid power - whatever the brownish stuff is called. In the end, I look like some sort of cross between a painted baby doll and a whore, although my friends touch my shoulder lightly and reassure me that it just looks strange on me since I rarely wear it. That they would look strange if I saw them without it.

To insult everyone who can’t read, the situation feels like what it must be like to not be able to read. I walk the streets everyday, looking at the women with shining pink lips and flawless-looking skin and eyes that pop, and it’s so easy for them. Natural. They take it for granted. They do it every morning without thinking, like how I read Newsweek or the back of the cereal box.

But really, when I think about it, I’m not even sure I want to wear makeup - and that’s not merely sour grapes. First and foremost, it’s expensive. Lately I’ve been consciously trying to cut spending that’s unnecessary to my happiness, and I remember when I was a teen I read about how much women spent on beauty products a year and it was staggering. There are just other things I’d rather have, like the money, for one.

Next, I have to wonder what makeup is doing to women, right along with uncomfortable shoes and botox and padded bras. Why are women expected to wear makeup while men are not, for example? It might seem like a silly question, but I’m not so sure - if all men walked around in lipstick, wouldn’t that seem weird? I guess we could talk about genetics and ancestors and gender roles and whatever, but I say that even if it is has been “natural” for women to rely on their appearance in centuries past, it doesn’t mean we have to abide by that or use it as an excuse. I mean, I want you to close your eyes and picture your father or boyfriend with bright red lipstick on. Maybe some sweeping blush. That’s weird, right? Then why would I do that?

On the other hand, I want my eyes to pop. Maybe not every day, but every once and a while. The feeling creeps out sometimes, like when I put on a skirt. Maybe it is genetic. Maybe I’m just getting older and that’s making me less idealistic or more materialistic or, simply, more splotchy and uneven, especially in the T-zone.

I’ve been talking about this with some of my more savvy makeup friends. They’ve suggested a visit to a nearby makeup counter and a consultation. As terrifying as that sounds on all levels (the face level, the comfort level, the talking to strange painted ladies level, the being in the mall level, the wallet level) it sounds like something I have to go through before I know what’s right for me. And I’m not just talking about eye shadow shades.

I’ll report back next week with the results.