Unapologetic, Unpretty, Un-pit-iful

Social media has given rise to the dreaded selflies, and love it or hate it, they are not going away any time soon. While the content of a selfie is always the same, the context can vary innumerably, and the way in which a selfie is presented says everything. Take for example, the term "belfie," adapted from "selfie," it is used to describe a more specific region of the self… the butt. It is a huge trend among female Instagrammers, the most famous "belfier" being non other than Jen Selter, whose ass defies all laws of skinny-jewish-white-girl anatomy. God bless her.

That being said, a woman's physique, her face, her hair, her makeup, her clothing, is yet again put on display in some ridiculous objectification of a female. Pieces of her are picked apart and placed under a microscope; a giant, virtual microscope for all who come across to analyze. And as image sharing becomes our main form of communication, female notoriety becomes less and less of a meritocracy. Not that it ever was to begin with! But the practice of valuing a woman based solely on her appearance certainly isn't aided by rampant social media whoring.

Sometimes I am myself irresistibly drawn by the lure of selfie sharing.  There are times when I'm desperately tempted to participate after a good squat session at the gym. I can't help but stand in the mirror with my phone chanting, "Must… resist… belfie!"

So it seems an unlikely place for a feminist movement to arise, especially one as subversive and "un-pretty" as this. Ladies and gentlemen- the armpit hair. More specifically female armpit hair. Allowing one's feminine hairy bits to grow freely is hardly a new feminist concept. But growing it out and dying the hair all sorts of bold colors is another story. Rather than privately abiding by one's personal preference this new practice DEMANDS that people take notice of the choice. If you saw a woman standing in front of you in line at the grocery store with bright purple armpit hair you would do more than just stare. This trend is not conventionally beautiful, but it is thought provoking to say the least.

When I first discovered this story I was taken back by the images of women proudly flaunting their hairy pits. It made me slightly uneasy. I of course was not alone in this as I surveyed the responses from the public which ranged from being mildly off-put to outright disgusted.

I had to think about why this is a subject of such contention to begin with?

Even when scripted film or television attempts to portray a survival scenario, (think films like Alien or Blue Lagoon, or series like Lost or The Walking Dead), taking pains with details like unkempt hair, a dirty face, tattered clothing, there is always one thing that remains uncompromised in an outright betrayal of authenticity-the women always maintain pristine pits.

Having bare armpits was not customary in the United States until the early 1920's, coinciding with the time when sleeveless dresses were coming into fashion. In fact it's been more specifically attributed to the May 1915 issue of Harper's Bazaar, in which an ad was featured with a young woman in a sleeveless dress posed with both arms over her head. From that point on, shaved pits have become de rigeur to femininity.

But what if the advertisers had not shaved her armpits? What if every ad thereafter portrayed women with their arms raised, hair and all? It is possible that this perfect hairless paragon would never come about. And if it didn't, would we still be as put-off by such images of a female body? I'd like to think not. As I sift through the pictures of these female hipster revolutionaries I find that the novelty wares off rather quickly, and I am no more bothered by the sight of armpit hair than I am by a bad haircut. It just… is.

Don't fear, people. I don't anticipate a one-upman's trend of outgrown lady-mustaches or uni-brows. There is a purpose behind this movement and it is not by any means to be beautiful. It is meant to tell other women that it is okay to let your body be. If you want to keep your armpit hair, keep it! If you don't, shave it! The point is that it is your choice! And I'm on board with any movement that gives personal choices back to women.

Panera Bread, Potato Blood, and Loneliness

I've switched locations today in an attempt to mix things up; give myself a new environment, a new flow of creativity. So now I'm sitting at a Panera bread wishing I had just stuck to Starbucks. There's no music to drown out the sounds of unofficial lunch meetings and girls in "study groups" taking selfies. Instead of the beautiful whir of espresso machines there's just the clanging of silverware on plastic trays. I would say it feels like my high school cafeteria except this is "fancy." As in, I just spent $9 for a coffee and a scoop of tuna wrapped in a piece of lettuce fancy. Glutton for punishment I am!

Anyway.

I was supposed to see friends last week. People from college I haven't seen since last Christmas. We were all excited until the time came to solidify our plans- at which point everyone turns into the tentative, noncommittal weirdos that have taken over our generation like the pod people. We were supposed to go bowling and then go out for drinks. Bowling would at least give us all something to do, something to interact with and bond over. Nothing gets people relaxed and laughing like a little friendly competition.

Oh right, and alcohol. As expected, everyone bailed last minute on the bowling idea and decided to just meet for drinks. I've come to realize that if plans involve anything outside of meeting at a bar to get hammered there is no interest. I ended up bailing on the meetup altogether because a) I have no interest in meeting people in a place where I can barely hear myself think and b) Just before I was supposed to go I... had an accident.

I was attempting to make some homemade sweet potato chips using my handy little mandolin slicer and I mandolin sliced my fucking thumb. Curse you, kitchen gods!
Don't' get me wrong, it's an excellent tool, but a word of advice: Do not use it without a hand protector. Blood soaked sweet potato is awfully tangy. So that put a damper on the night. Of course my sliced thumb was also a convenient cop-out. Technically I could have gone… but at the same time I just couldn't.

A recent study was published to the Psychological Bulletin entitled Loneliness is a disease that changes the brain's structure and function. Taking an excerpt from the brain research digest,

"Functional imaging evidence also shows lonely people have a suppressed neural response to rewarding social stimuli, which reduces their excitement about possible social contact; they also have dampened activity in brain areas involved in predicting what others are thinking – possibly a defence mechanism based on the idea that it’s better not to know. All this adds up to what the authors characterise as a social "self-preservation mode."

So basically, loneliness has the proven potential to perpetuate itself. Lonely people self isolate. I can obviously attest to this. So how to break the cycle?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? 

The Morbid Anatomy Museum: So Dead Inside

The location is an oddity in itself. Situated in a warehouse on the 3rd avenue industrial strip in Gowanus, one would not expect to find a museum. But as of last June, The Morbid Anatomy Museum has found itself a home at the corner of 3rd and 7th in a building that has since been updated with some glass windows and a thick coat of black paint; now a lovely, stark contrast to the mucky shipping containers and storage units surrounding it.

Upon entering you are welcomed into a small gift shop/café where you can sip a hot cappuccino next to a freshly taxidermic fox or a specimen jar of rodent foetusus. It's comfortable. Upstairs there is an exhibit space and a small library, downstairs there is more exhibit space that is also used as a room for lecture series and events. In this gift shop alone you can get lost in the many curiosities that line the shelves for purchase. But I found it quite interesting to look around and observe the people who were coming to the museum. There were of course the folks that you would expect to see in a place like this- each representing some combination of steampunk, goth, and modern hipster. Likely people predisposed to the dark, historic and scientific. Appropriate.

But sprinkled all around was, well, everybody else. The woman staring intently at the wax moulage of a syphilis outbreak looks like the woman you'd find sifting through the sale rack of sweaters at Banana Republic. The man calling his friend to take photos of him with a framed taxidermic bat is the same man you'd find yelling drunken profanities at a Rangers game. All of these people under one roof brought together by none other than… morbidity.

In our modern culture death is something with which we have a strange relationship. Or rather, a distant one. Death is morose and Victorian, it's unpleasant and therefore treated like it doesn't exist. We push it out of our consiousness unless otherwise forced to acknowledge it. But deep inside we all know it's there. It is as present in our lives as being alive; two sides of the same coin. Luckily there are some of us, like the enthusiasts directing the museum, who are more ostensibly fascinated by death and all that surrounds it. They've created a space that allows others, (who for one reason or another are not as enamored), the chance to indulge the secret part that exists in all of us- Morbid Curiosity.

So if you're not afraid to explore this dark and beautiful realm, be sure to stop by The Morbid Anatomy Museum. It will be well worth it. Even if all you get out of it is a few photos of dead bats!

Thoughts for the Day

I shut my eyes and I can see the glowing outlines of the veins inside my head. If I keep them shut too long they'll fade away. Also I'll look like a crazy person sleeping in a Starbucks on a Thursday afternoon. I've done stranger things I suppose…

Everything is now red and white and redolent of cinnamon sugar coffee syrups. Thankfully we've yet to be bombarded by the caterwauling Christmas music that seems to begin immediately after the the first pumpkin is smashed on November 1st.

So why am I here on a Thursday afternoon? Well, I've switched jobs. I no longer work at said restaurant on the upper west side. In fact that lasted all of a month. I don't have time for mean queens and catty girls who will never know the feeling of real joy as they try to get by in the big city by out-bitching one another. Not to say that I'm a joyful individual but at least I take my misery out on MYSELF. Come on, people. Get with it!

I now work three days a week at a place in Astoria that touts epicurean cocktails not served since the prohibition era made by adorable vest-clad "mixologists" behind a dimly lit up cycled wooden counter. It's a hipster's wet dream.

So, how do I fit into this? Well our glorified little bar also offers table service where we'll bring you well plated cheese fries and quesadillas at prices likely three times what they're worth. But I have a lot to be grateful for. I no longer have to commute into manhattan. I no longer have to deal with a cesspool of alcoholic misanthropic twenty-somethings. Okay… the alcoholic part still remains. But I'm beginning to accept that every person I encounter who is of an age within 10 years of mine is a high functioning alcoholic. I think it comes with the territory of living in a society that inundates its young a steady feed of fantasy for which to strive but could never actually attain. The alcohol suppresses the gnawing reality of the broken dreams that now define our lives.

It's survival of the fittest in a system that cannot properly thrive without the firm, inextricable bedrock of the poor and underclass. What a juxtaposition. A society that force-feeds a lifestyle unto those who can least afford to sustain any semblance of it. I'll admit, if I see someone who has achieved even a reasonable amount of comfort or success, I'm wary of who that person has stepped on in order to have arrived there.

So what motivates me? Nothing really. Maybe pervasive loneliness. Boredom. Swimming through a perpetual state of just being "over it," tapping my veins to see if anything will give me a sense of life again. As of late it's been nothing. I'm numb just like everybody else. Hyper-connected and wholly unaware of what's really going on. In ten minutes I'll leave this place to go to the gym, not to stay in shape but to give myself something to do. Something that feels productive. Positive. After all, how could going to the gym ever be a bad thing?

I could clean my shit storm of a room. Or better yet offer to clean my shit storm of a house in which I've lived rent free for the past 12 years or so. I could apply for a job that actually requires a resume. Maybe sign up for some volunteer work. But I just don't see the point.

I do however see the point of running aimlessly on a treadmill until I stop hating myself... even if it's just for a moment.

The Snoring Dead

The highly rated AMC series, "The Walking Dead," is something I've been meaning to watch for quite some time. "After all," I thought, "it's been on the air for five seasons now, it's gotta be good!"

Ignoring the fact that this plague they've constructed contains inconsistencies you could drive a boat through, there is such a substantial lack of plot that I am dumbstruck the show has lasted this long. Each episode drags at a snails pace with the same scenarios repeating over and over again. The migraine inducing sounds of hacking, rasping, dead folk are far overused. Although perhaps giving the zombies such a prominent voice detracts from the weak dialogue between the living.

Still the most common gripe I heard about the series, before ever watching it, was that the main characters were killed off too frequently. "Oh no!" I thought, "I'll start to care about one of these people and he or she is going be ripped apart by a zombie." Except that never happened. In all four seasons I've watched there has been so little character development that it's a wonder the writers haven't just killed all of them off at once. With ample opportunities for a storyline or even flashbacks to give us some idea of who these people are and why should we care the writers take- zero. I understand that survival is the premise, which doesn't include reminiscing about a life pre-apocalypse or building relationships with your fellow survivors that are at the very least- interesting. The most important thing is to kill the zombies! But does that make for compelling television? Apparently. So far it's been enough to stay on the air for almost 6 seasons.

Don't get me wrong, the writing is not without some creativity. Zombie annihilation takes all sorts of gnarly and fantastic forms in this series, showing that there is a trace of imagination. As I recall in the most recent episode I watched endured, a "walker" fell through a dilapidated blood soaked roof only to be ripped open on the fall-through. Except he remained hanging from the ceiling by his bloody, tangled intestines. Yes. But of course this predicament was not a concern and he remained dead-set (he-heh) on reaching for the delicious humans beneath him. I also quite liked it when a zombie, surrounded by a hoard of other zombies, had his entire head squished through the holes of a fence while trying to reach the people who found safety at a prison yard. Apparently when you turn to a zombie your head also turns to silly putty. But other than those brief moments of grotesqueness bordering on hilarity the show moves at the pace of… a zombie.

"Nobody ever mentioned just how boring the end of the world was gonna be." Beth, S 4 Ep. 3.

Boy, you said it!

Reflections on Basicness

I'm back! Plopped at a Starbucks in Rockville Centre, a New York equivalent of ol' Malahide. It's just a town over from where I live and is arguably one of the birthing places of the "basic bitch," (a crude and overused euphemism for young white girls who wear a strange albeit costly uniform of leggings, Ugg boots, and North Face jackets. They're known to frequent Starbucks and clog your Instagram feed).

A More Informative Deconstruction of "Basic"

Fourteen year old- ahem- young ladies, like to hang around here because when you think about it, where else do they have to go? I study their interactions like an anthropologist...or creepy, watchful, coffee shoppe loiterer. Whichever term you prefer. They stand in a huddle around the receiving counter, eyes glued to their phones waiting to take a picture of the new holiday cups in which their pumpkin spice lattes will arrive. I can sense how little they know of what really awaits them in life. I see that their beauty is still untampered; unsullied by the self-loathing that is practically demanded of a woman in this day and age. As though I were a mother to these girls, I'm relieved to see only a few of them wearing eyeliner and lipgloss. All this sugar consumption hasn't made their hair thin or their asses fat… yet. Most enviably it is clear that the boredom of life has not yet set in for them. Little things like holiday coffee cups and lipgloss can still provide so much joy. If you could bottle this fleeting phase of a young woman's life it would be worth a million.

Yet in this nascent stage of womanhood, they are already being torn down; by the media, by each other. While I might not relate to their lifestyles by way of both choice and circumstance, I don't see the reason to hate them. Yes, guys. They're privileged and superficial, hardly concerned with what most of us consider to be important matters but wait… they're still people. Harmless. Usually with potential for growth unless otherwise squashed by the hate of those who don't approve of their lives. Some form of this type of girl has existed throughout time, and always will. I think we can get over it  already.

Hey. Oh, Hi!

Didn't see you there. I've just been super busy. I went ahead and applied for restaurant jobs in the city lying blindly about having had "a ton of experience working in high-traffic/high-volume restaurants" and guess what? It worked! So now I'm working full time in a restaurant on the upper west side and I have no business being there. Not to mention- the cost of commuting from good ol' Long Island just to get to this restaurant costs me about 25 dollars each day. Wee! I'm hoping the pay will ultimately justify this insanity.