Awkward

So I'm taking one of those well-meaning but bone-headed surveys about interactions with people of different religious and cultural groups. Midway through, I get this star: "I often give positive responses to my culturally different counterpart during our interaction."

Shortly thereafter, this one: "I have a feeling of enjoyment toward differences between my culturally distinct counterpart and me."

I'm supposed to rate whether or not I agree or disagree with these statements. Dear God. The questions sound like they were written by a fourth-grader doing a vocab assignment. The survey-makers couldn't come up with a more honest and authentic way to ask about relationships across cultural groups?

Also, does anyone else find these surveys to be utterly bogus? First off, I have friends whom I know are uncomfortable discussing issues of culture and race with people from "different backgrounds." I know, because they squirm on the rare occasion that I talk about it (and I do mean, rare). But I guarantee that these kids aren't going to write "I do not have a feeling of enjoyment" on that last statement.

At heart, people befriend other people with whom they feel they have something in common. If this survey wants to get at the heart of the matter, they need to ask questions like: "of my close friends, I feel a majority are the same race as me." Ask the same thing about religion and culture, see what comes up.

They'll find that people hang out with others who share their background and interests, for the most part. The question isn't whether we avoid people of other backgrounds - although many do - but how comfortable people are, within those similar networks, talking about their small but obvious differences.

I can walk down the street with a good (white) friend of mine from high school, and we can both know that we're not the same race, but neither of us is comfortable talking about it. Why is that? Aren't we friends? As time goes by, I'm a lot less uncomfortable talking about these things, but I'm constantly surprised by how rarely other people (particularly white people) are comfortable talking about it.

Just the other day I bonded with a bank teller over the fact that she was Mexican and I was Indian. We talked for at least half an hour about our families, where they lived ,what our food was like, etc. And this isn't a unique experience: all of my friends who are black, Hispanic, and Asian ask, "so, where's your family from?" and they want to know the answer. They want to talk about it, they want to hear about it. It saddens me - I can't pretend it doesn't - that none of my white friends ever ask me this. And on the rare occasions that I bring it up, many of them shut the conversation down. (Not all, but many do. And I wonder why. I honestly want to know why.) My interactions with these white friends, many of whom are very close, are limited to superficial observations like, "Well, you must love spicy food" or "so, your parents planning to marry you off?" Which, while amusing, is hardly the stuff friends are made of.

For example, I read the Gita almost every night. Its teachings have had a huge impact on how I live my life. But no one has ever asked me about my religious background. Keep in mind that I have talked with Christian friends about their church services, up to and including quoting from the Bible and attending Christian services, and not once has anyone expressed interest in being accorded that honor on my end.

But then, in general it's surprising to me how eager people are to talk about themselves ad nauseum without ever returning the favor.

What I loved more than anything about my roommates in New York was how freely we shared our differences. We had this colossal thing in common - we were young Northwestern magazine students studying in NYC - and everything else seemed trivial. That between us we were a Catholic, a Protestant, two Hindus and a Muslim (almost sounds like a joke!), or Asian, black, Indian and Pakistani - these things paled. The fact that in a single quarter I could pray in Arabic, attend Bible study, discuss conversion to Catholicism, talk about my own background - without feeling ashamed or like I was infringing on someone else's time - it was a small miracle.

Of my four best friends from home, we are a Muslim, a Catholic, a Hindu and a Jew. But the strange thing is that I didn't realize this until I went to college. I didn't realize that it was rare. At the same time, I regret that we didn't take more advantage of those differences. I wish we had talked about it with each other more than we did. As we get older, we have all moved deeper into those cultural identities. My Muslim friend is spending the year in Syria studying Arabic, my Jewish friend spent her summer studying Jewish history and practice all across Europe and working at a Jewish history museum, I myself am reading the Gita and taking Hindi and plan to work in India when I graduate.

I hope, as we get older, that these things continue to enrich us. As people who have a lot in common. And the fact that we have strong ties to our separate communities - that's a commonality as well.

Ultimately, they're my friends, and we still have a lot in common. We have a shared history.

Adventures in the Harry S. Butt Auditorium

So I used to be a dancer. And I often performed (with friends!) at the local community college theater. Needless to say, the first time my dance teacher told me to report to the Harry S. Butt Auditorium, I thought it was some kind of practical joke.

It was not. Over the years, I got so used to it that I'd casually drop the name while telling other friends where to catch my latest show. Led to conversations like:
Me: So, I'm in a show this weekend.
Friend: Cool, where's it at? I might come.
Me: MC. The Harry S. Butt Auditorium.
Friend: (awkward pause)
Me: What?

For years, I thought Harry was the unexpected tenth child in a very Catholic family, or the result of 72 hours of excruciating labor, or the child of a crack addict. Anything that would warrant inflicting punishment like that on a child. But a friend of mine suggested a far more likely scenario: perhaps Harry really was a joke.

She asked me: If, in years to come, you made millions of dollars and lost all touch with reality, wouldn't you consider donating money for an auditorium at your local community college?
Me: Sure.
Her: And wouldn't you, out of perversity and meanness, be tempted to call it the Crystal Chanda Lear Auditorium, or the Uranus Auditorium, or even the Harry S. Butt Auditorium?
Me: Theoretically, won't I be more mature by then?
Her: (awkward pause) Even so.

So perhaps there is no Harry S. Butt. Perhaps he's the vindictive dream of a wealthy madman with a penchant for potty humor. Strangely, I don't know which is worse: a world in which this kind of man exists, or a world in which parents would inflict such a name on an innocent child.

Men and their Money

So as I was browsing through the endless archive of trash that is CW programming (and remember this is the network that dishes out our weekly dose of Top Model, that pioneered Girlfriends and continues to perpetrate Gossip Girl) I came across a snotty little segment on Gossip Girls fashion. Remember that this show is the later brainchild of the OC masterminds. Whatever that says for it.

Well, Gossip Girls - the series - targets an audience of middle school, high school and young college-age women. The characters - high schoolers - love fashion. They have the bohemian joie de vivre of people with trust funds and too many magazine subscriptions. In the segment above, a well-meaning stylist instructs average girls on how to copy the sexy styles onscreen, complete with a well-orchestrated nod to Victoria's Secret.

I recently read another article in the WSJ that mentioned that young women were less likely than young men to have significant stock market investments, or even to save at all.
They can work for twenty years and have nothing to show for it. Which is ironic, because young women now surpass men as wage earners in many urban markets. (Although not nationally...)

The point is, when a 15-year-old girl drops $60 of Daddy's plastic on this (the bra you can wear 100 ways, none of which would be 'under clothes') is anyone surprised that she's terminally broke ten years down the road?

Not to say I haven't hit up that sale section a few too many times. But then, I've been through the fire.

Working Hard for the Man

So the other day I'm in the airport and I see a copy of the #1 New York Times bestseller "Eat, Pray, Love." And I think, well, everyone likes this, it must be good! So I buy it, and start to read.

Well. The author finds "God" in Chapter Two, and considering as the memoir's subtitle is "One Woman's Search for Everything" it's almost sad that she hits the major plot point by the 10,000 word mark. But why doesn't she end it there? Good question. In search of the answer, I struggled on through another 10,000 words, until I couldn't tell whether my headache was airplane nausea or sympathetic nausea. My thoughts varied: they ranged from 'why would anyone read this' to 'why does this person have any friends?' Because I can honestly say that in all my years of reading magazines, memoirs, novels, etc, I have never come across a book where the author seemed like such a boring, self-absorbed, faux-inspired narcissist that I actually had to put it down.

And yet that happened. Keep in mind that I slogged through all of Tale of Two Cities and almost all of Lady Chatterley's Lover. As well as Wonkette. And then I thought: perhaps she had a different audience in mind. You know, another demographic. Maybe she was writing to an audience.

Maybe, when she "realized" that she didn't want to be married anymore, what she meant was that she was experiencing genuine feelings of pain and loss. Not that any of this came across in words, per se. Oh, and there was that affair.

But whatever. Far be it from me to judge.

Then I came across this article, written by the same author several years prior. I immediately recognized the smug, self-absorbed tone, the faux-inspiration, the Yoga Lite approach to eternity. And then I thought: wow, this isn't an act. This is what she is actually like. Both of these pieces contain a self-satisfied edge of "this is hard, but wouldn't it be harder if I weren't very attractive, white and upper-class? Eat your hearts out at my flame-breathing, man-baiting, home-wrecking style, bitches!"

But maybe I'm just getting too worked up.

Flimsy Pretext

So...in my defense...I only found this because I was following a link on a blog that I read. Of course, once I found it, I couldn't look away (it's for charity! And gay rights!) Somehow, knowing gay men as I do (not that I do, but I can imagine) charity seems like a flimsy, flimsy pretext for ogling half-naked dudes. But then, God is a flimsy pretext for donating to church (when you get right down to it) so let's say faith. What would life be without faith in things unseen? Staring at these men, I had great faith in their cause, even though I couldn't technically see it. I also had faith in what I could see, which by the way wasn't much when compared to, say, this.

And, as Sir Winston Churchill would say, if you can't save the world doing what you love, why the fuck would you bother saving it at all? (And then he'd light one cigar off the end of the previous and resume reading "The Hard, Manly Thrust of the Axe into the Soft Cavern of the Surrendering Colonies" - just one selection from his Nobel winning ouevre - to a roomful of naked 15-year-old girls.)

So, now that I've made a feeble charge towards the high ground, let me shoutout to Texas, where fundraising drives still look like this, which might explain why homosexuality has more appeal than Southern Living, except in the conflicted hearts of men like Larry Craig, where the two are just about even.

But returning to the parenthetical subject of naked 15-year-old girls ("I swear, Your Honor, I had no idea the SafeSearch was off"). When I was 15, I did not waltz around mailing naked photos of myself to rock stars. I once sent a fan letter to an actor whom I shall never name, and rest assured that should I ever be famous (unlikely) I will be motivated to change my name strictly on the possibility that that letter might still be lying around somewhere.

Vanessa Hudgens, on the other hand, seems to have gone shutter-happy in the nude, which confirms my suspicion that there was something off about her. She has sneaky eyes.

And on the other hand, aren't our kids tech-savvy nowadays?