I know this is a little late, but I keep meaning to get to it and forgetting and Emily's post just reminded me: I totally broke up with a longtime boyfriend on March 13, 2004. That band guy? What's his face? Anyway, please leave your condolences and tell your own breakup stories and ask me out in the comments. Thanks!
Also: should I eat ice cream and if so, what kind?
Even my girliest girlfriend who owns every episode of SATC on DVD:
(Re: a press release that called some author "the next Carrie Bradshaw"):
"I've been hearing about Carrie Bradshaw since I was fifteen. I'm exhausted. Where is the next annoying trend?"
My esoteric conversational meta parodies of shows I hate will never be appreciated in my lifetime.
I promise, I swear, I vowed to myself never to mention a "girly blogger" by name again, lest another idiotic person ask me about some nonexistent "blog feud", and because the whole subject is boring and I'd rather concentrate on the more well-known ways women humiliate themselves and each other in public (like chick lit or the Times' Modern Love column), but something just happened that has made it impossible to keep that vow.
I was just ordering an iced tea in the crowded cafe of the Borders at Columbus Circle, when I hear someone in the cafe yell "I'll link to it! On my website! And you'll get TONS OF TRAFFIC! I have TEN THOUSAND READERS PER DAY!" I glanced at the person yelling from her laptop-laden cafe table, then glanced at the person she was yelling to - an older woman sitting nearby, clearly a stranger. I guess the stranger didn't hear the first time because the person yelled again "TEN THOUSAND PEOPLE READ MY SITE EVERY DAY!"
Before I even had time to process the embarrassment I felt for this person for saying such a David Brent sort of thing, I realized (I'll admit: to my glee) that this misguided young lady was none other than the lastest recipient of a half-million dollar book deal from Judith Reagan: Miss Stephanie Klein.
I'm happy to report that the self-confidence (cough! euphemism! cough!) she manifests on her site, is, in fact, also present in real life. From my gawking spot across the cafe, I can't testify to her firmness or fashionablness, but I think everyone in that cafe was busy facing it - she's fetching.
As Miss Klein is the Queen of the "I totally got recognized on the street by one of my thousands of fans!" post, I was DYING to ask for an autograph, hoping to end up on the site, but I chickened out. The end.
TO: lindsayATlindsayism.com FROM: xxxxxxxx SUBJECT: Behaviour Patterns
Dear Lindsay,
You seem like a sharp, intelligent young woman, who knows how to handle men. (MT even thinks of you when drunk, and I'm sure that's saying something). But how long do you think this will last?
Thanks for the compliments! I plan to be sharp, intelligent, a woman, and to know how to "handle men" (whatever that means) forever. (The young part, unfortunately, ended when I turned 25.) As for MT, he's just a friend, and his drunk messages are hilarious (sample: "Lindsay Robertson, I remember when you used to rock.(click)"
When women swear, talk about porn, go out getting drunk and stoned, then the behaviour of men changes accordingly.
(Oh my god, are you saying they might start thinking of me as an equal? But I'm supposed to be from Venus!)
(MT gets drunk to talk to you - is that what you want?)
(MT is always drunk - don't you read his site?)
We women are the ones that set the behaviour patterns of men; once we lose it, they follow dramatically and 1000 times worse. Finally we women suffer because men will then start to treat us like primitive cave creatures who get pulled around by their hair.
I consider myself equal to guys, so this just doesn't apply to me.
If you don't believe me, read Tom Wolfe's latest "I am Charlotte Simmons". This is really a parody of our times. And a warning.
Admit it: this is you, isn't it, Tom?
Anyway, give men a chance to sober up and be decent. Once that happens, you will not regret 20 years down the road that it was really your own behaviour that put you in the corner.
This is going to sound radical, but men have pretty much always been decent and respectful and nice to me. I know, I know, it has to be false, right? I'm a chick, so therefore surely I must feel like a victim, sitting around on a Saturday night waiting for the phone to ring, asking for advice on when to put out, buying dating manuals to learn how to pretend to have self-esteem, obsessing over every detail of a date, saying things like "Why do men say they're going to call but don't?", despising my exes, saying that there are no good men in New York, etc. That just has never been the case for a lot of us. Where is the chick lit for chicks like us?
I do enjoy your posts, it certainly beats those others (_____________, et. al.). I wonder though why the swearing, the drinking, the getting stoned and the porn? Suffice maybe that I’ve noticed it.
I'll cop to everything else, but I don't watch porn, I just make jokes about it. In fact, I make jokes about a lot of things. This website is certainly not meant to be a serious representation of everything I do or think about.
In good faith, as a warning I felt my duty to convey,
XXX
(Excerpt of conversation with best friend right before posting this:
lindsayism: Yeah, but I sort of want to use this to say something about women. (go ahead, groan)
XXXXXX: No, I knew when I read it that you were going to put your post-feminist face on.)
You know, I would love to train the whole arsenal on this one, but the fact is, the awfulness of the article (and the blog it's based on is completely self-explanatory, and to point things out would be an insult to your intelligence.
(It's like that show "Mystery Science Theater 3000" - I don't need to watch this guy watch things and make witty comments, I have wittier friends who make wittier comments, you know?)
My overwhelming feeling after reading the article and perusing the blog (as well as the blog of the "other woman" the article refers to was this: I don't know which I'm ashamed of more right now: being a blogger, or being a woman.
I'm going to stop procrastinating and go through all the responses you sent in to the Busting the Chick Lit Myth post a few weeks ago. Maybe this Heather girl will find it in her daily self-googling and maybe it will help her get some self-respect and a life of her own and stop web-stalking blogger musicians who, as Julie the Co-worker just pointed out, "isn't even hot!!!"
Oh, I was just scrolling down the page and saw where Fishy's object-of-blog-stalking-obsession referred to her as "bloggerati." There are actual people who speak this way with a straight face and take blogging seriously ?
(Yes, there are. And they live in a magical place called the Upper East Side and blog about their "addiction to Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream" and wonder why they can't get a boyfriend to save their lives. Helen Fielding, so much to answer for.)
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* We've all seen the Ashlee Simpson video and recaps by now (I actually watched SNL Saturday night, but during Weekend Update I accidentally put my hand into a glass of Pinot Noir, and the ensuing blood-spurting glass-shard-tweezing chaos caused me to miss Ashlee's big moment.) I think my friend Will said it best: "From now on when I make a mistake I'm just going to do a little hoedown." My sources tell me that Ashlee will be calling in to TRL to explain everything and save her career, this afternoon.
* My self-amusing idea last Friday to paper my out-of-town boss's office door with TPS Report Cover Sheets backfired when it turns out he hasn't seen Office Space! Just my luck.
* "It's like Xbox. Only you die."
* People keep telling me this site is blocked as porn at their offices. Does anyone know why or what I could do about that?
* Thank you to everyone who has written in about "the chick lit myth". I'm compiling the responses. We should have all this figured out for good pretty soon, and then nobody will ever write a patronizing book ever again.
First, this article, "Television Without Pity" explores the repercussions of the case brought against the writers of "Friends" by a disgruntled former writer's assistant. I'm really new to collaborative writing, but from what I've seen and participated in, the writers are absolutely right. If your sensibilities are easily offended, you have no business attempting to work in a creative collaborative situation. It's cases like this that keep women out of writer's rooms. This chick should have tried for a job at Oprah or on Lifetime: Television for Victims instead.
Speaking of things that make me ashamed of my gender, this article by Jack Marin on the new bestseller "He's Just Not That Into You" , written by former Sex In the City writers is right on the money in its proposition that maybe, just maybe, he's "not that into you" because there's something wrong with you:
"Any single guy will tell you there aren't that many good women around, either. When he finds one, he marries her if she will have him. Let's agree that neither sex is exclusively to blame when things don't wind up in wedded bliss.
There is something wildly condescending about the image of women as helpless creatures standing around minding their own business until men come into their lives and break their hearts. This, after how many waves of feminism?"
Right on! I don't think the writer goes far enough, though. (Though maybe his harsher opinions were edited out. Being, for better or worse, my own editor, I'm happy to step in and express mine.)
I have a lot of guy friends, and from listening to them I know there is just as much of a dearth of "good" women as "good" men. From my own experience and from observation, it seems like women fall into two categories: either they're successful with guys or they're not. Either guys fall for them hard and right away, or not at all. Either they always call, or they never call. And there's no way of telling who is going to fall into which category - it certainly seems to have nothing to do with looks. When Jack Berger told Miranda that the guy who didn't call her back just "wasn't that into" her, he should have added "Because you and your friends are desperate, painfully un-funny, materialistic cunts who have nothing to offer conversation-wise but lists of things you've recently purchased and no interests of your own and no curiosity and no motivation but snagging a rich husband as soon as possible."
That applies to the four women of that awful show, but they're just archetypes. What about real people? What makes some girls sought-after and others not? I'm going to get reamed for this, but why do I keep having the same conversation in hushed tones in ladies rooms about the Chick Lit Myth, that unquestioned accepted wisdom that men are jerks who never call the next day, that it's so hard to find a good guy...when this is the exact opposite of our experience? And nobody ever talks about it!
In my experience, this city is is chock full of "viable" guys. They're everywhere! I honestly think that any girl who thinks otherwise is just not interested in being friends with straight men - or she has no common ground on which to relate to them. The girls I know who are most successful with guys are the same girls who have a lot of platonic straight male friends. There has to be a connection there.
So, I'm asking what makes you pursue one girl over another? (And let's leave looks out of it, since we're assuming you were initially attracted to her enough to go out with her.) Email me at lindsay(at)lindsayism.com and I'll tally and post the results of this unscientific survey later this week.
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