thebitterbabe

never married, over forty, a little bitter

Category: media

August 15, 2014

beacons

Ah well. Mejor solo que mal acompanado.

http://www.theawl.com/2014/02/ask-polly-should-i-play-it-cool-or-ask-for-more-and-be-that-girl

And what’s so fucking attractive about that easy-going, no-problem girl anyway? Does she have a single fucking thing in common with Lorde, or is she inadvertently aspiring to be a muted, high-fiving fuck doll? Do you want to be a person, or do you want to be an emotional Hooters waitress, serving up cuddles and hot wings and laughing it off when your ass gets pinched for the 15th million time?

[…]

AND there’s a smallish chance that he’ll say, “Yeah, I can do that. I want to be with you.” When you stand up for what you want, and you aren’t afraid to say it out loud, you’d be amazed how well the world responds to that.

But, let’s be honest, lots of guys don’t like it. You know what kinds of guys don’t like it? The guys who are hiding from themselves, the guys who don’t want to be seen, the guys who don’t want to show up. AND THEY ARE FUCKING EVERYWHERE, dude. But you don’t want someone like that. You want one of the good ones, the ones who can look you in the eye and say, “YES. What you want is not unreasonable. I want to be intellectually met, too. I want to be emotionally open, too. I want to be with YOU.”

[…]

Do some writing about what you really, really want from love. Make a list. Then list the things that make you feel disappointed and sad. Talk it all through with a few friends. Revise your list. Spend some time alone and really feel your way through this. You shouldn’t be talking yourself into or out of anything. You should be looking deep inside and asking yourself what you want, how you want to live. You should be reaching for the very best possible love and life for yourself. You should be thinking of your favorite bad ass. Don’t you deserve to treat yourself with as much adoration and love as Lorde does? And if not WHY THE FUCK NOT? Why don’t you cherish yourself and who you are like THAT? What damns you to half-assed fucking men, exactly?

[…]

Listen to me closely now: The people who dare to ask for an expansive, life-altering love, who will be alone rather than settle for less, are the ones who find it. People who accept less, who figure they don’t deserve any better, who figure that it’s too much of a risk to tell the truth and scare men off, are the ones who live with a constant feeling of disappointment and neglect. When you neglect yourself and your feelings, you get neglected by others, too.

Stand up for yourself. Stand up for what you want. Does that make you That Girl?

Then BE. THAT. GIRL.

Because That Girl is a shining beacon to the rest of us. That Girl doesn’t play along and call herself whatever some dude is calling her, whether it’s “pal” or “that chick I’m sleeping with” or “her, over there.” That Girl doesn’t sit through drifty, disconnected conversations with men who can’t show up. That Girl doesn’t care if you think she’s attractive or appropriate or easy to be around or not. She’s not caught up in some dude’s love affair—with himself, with his stuff, with his fantasy of how easy and sexy and mysterious True Love will be when he finally finds it, just like a porn flick starring him with a soundtrack by The Shins. That Girl is willing to risk his disapproval for the sake of her own happiness.

Fuck the critics. Fuck the onlookers. Fuck this cold, disapproving world, that doesn’t like That Girl or really any fucking girl at all, when it boils right down to it. BE THAT GIRL.

August 14, 2014

the landscape

I too have always loved Heather Havrilesky:

http://www.theawl.com/2013/10/ask-polly-how-do-i-find-true-love-and-stop-dating-half-assed-men

Now imagine for a second that someone writes to me and says, “Look, you’re just ok and you’re old and you’re wasting your time on this bullshit.” (Um, no one does that, because this isn’t Salon.) But imagine that someone does tell me that. And imagine that I spend several hours of my time explaining why I’m awesome and my work here is incredibly significant to the health of the planet, and I fucking matter and I have great ideas, brilliant fucking ideas, I’m a genius, and seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? Suddenly this tepid bit of flotsam is taking up my time, and instead of turning away from it, I’m making claims that my work is deeply important (which, well, is a highly subjective stance).

[…]

Please note: this world also devalues free-flowing, emotional discourse from a woman unless she’s also funny AND sexy. If you’re not super fucking hot and funny first, you can go fuck yourself, ladies.

[…]

Because tepid is everywhere. Tepid is the air we breathe. Listen to me: We can’t do anything right. We can’t say what we mean, we can’t be ourselves, we can’t age, we can’t talk about feelings, we can’t fuck up. This is how it feels to be a woman, motherfucker. The world is filled with human beings who want us to shut up and shake our asses, point blank, the end. Can you fucking imagine if we had our own Kanye? For her to have Kanye’s power, and get invited on Kimmel, of course she’d have to be a mega-hot, funny as shit woman who walked around looking exactly like the chick in the short skirt who eats giant hamburgers on those Carl Jr. ads, but instead of eating a hamburger she’d be saying FUCK YOU, YOU ARE A SEXIST FUCK. I mean, sure, we have our women who look mortal and say this. Are they on TV? Rachel Maddow, she’s on TV. How many people in that bar would even know who the fuck she is? Who listens closely to Lena Dunham, who is gorgeous by the way? No, she’s not shaped right to listen to, right? She’s too full of herself? She’s too annoying?

Let’s not fall down that rabbit hole. All I’m saying is, here we are in a fucked up world. And even when you find your species, or at least your genus, you still are sometimes just a piece of ass to the best of them. Not even because they’re incredibly sexist—maybe they’re just pragmatic, or ambivalent in this case. They don’t happen to love you, is all. They don’t think you’re a math genius or a historian, and they’re gonna call bullshit. They think that when you talk, you’re wasting their time a little. That doesn’t mean that they’re bad. Sure, you want those guys and their futons and their best friends Sean to go fuck themselves, but that doesn’t mean they’re evil. But once they don’t love you, who the fuck cares about them? Were those dudes in the bar sexist, or did they just think I’m sort of bossy and repellent? Who the fuck cares?

You’re hunting a very small group, that’s all. Your target demographic, it’s small. There’s more than one of them, but they’re not everywhere.

That doesn’t mean your odds are bad! You will find love. Believe me. But in order to find it, I think you have to prepare yourself for a life alone, and be at peace with that. It’s a real tightrope walk. I get that. But you won’t tell tepid to fuck off if you don’t believe in your heart that you will rock it out one way or another.

In order to tell tepid to fuck off once and for all, you MUST recognize that life among those who don’t appreciate or understand you is bullshit. You don’t want to live that way. You don’t want to be badgery and lonely while you’re with someone. You’d rather be alone.

What will make ALONE look good to you? You have to work on that. Because single life needs to look really, really good, you have to believe in it, if you’re going to hold out for that rare guy who makes you feel like all of your ideas start rapidly expanding and approaching infinity when you talk to him. You need to have a vision of life alone, stretching into the future, and you need to think about how to make that vision rich and full and pretty. You have to put on an artist’s mindset and get creative and paint some portrait of yourself alone that’s breathtaking. You have to bring the full force of who you are and what you love to that project.

[…]

You have to do a lot. And you have to do it all against a backdrop of indifference that, as you get older, curdles into a kind of disgust. But you know what? We have each other. We have worlds within us, you and me. This mean, mean planet still rewards those who can see the depth and beauty of what they carry around inside of themselves. This indifferent landscape will rise up and give you love if you share what you have inside, if you dare to believe in your potential even as people tell you it’s a mirage, if you ignore the ones who are allergic to free-flowing, emotional discourse from YOU. They are everywhere, and they don’t matter. God bless them. Come on their Hampton blouse, and move on.

6 Comments
August 3, 2014

hairy issues

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324591204579037370544014260

What causes this dip? Economic speculations concern financial pressures on sandwich generation middle-agers, with costs for mortgages, orthodontists and tuition, as well as the threat of the huge financial demands of an ailing parent. In contrast, psychologists have emphasized the different psychological challenges of different stages of life. Early adulthood is a time of expanding vistas, ambition and promise; stressors are coped with by conquering them. In contrast, healthy old age is when stressors are coped with by accommodating them; there is greater control of negative emotions, and the clutter of acquaintances has been pared down to the actual friends.

Middle age dangles in between, with the dip in well-being full of the poignancy of the human predicament. Plateaus are achieved in time for us to question whether they were worth it, and things that will never be accomplished loom larger, as we simultaneously accept and deny our mortality.

But as we wallow in this sturm und drang, along comes a study that upends this thinking. In a late 2012 paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alexander Weiss of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and colleagues demonstrated something remarkable: Other ape species also have the midlife dip in well-being.

Leave a comment
August 2, 2014

the dark

And this is largely why I stay in the public sector, and why I feel lucky that some random things fell into place to grant me my current job:

http://www.salon.com/2014/08/02/how_the_middle_class_got_screwed_college_costs_globalization_and_our_new_insecurity_economy/

Amid these shifting economic tides and morphing definitions, many have lost their way. While old beliefs such as that hard work will lead to security and prosperity have fallen by the wayside, it’s unclear to many Americans what new truths lay in their stead. As President Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson discovered, this lack of direction causes a great deal of unease. “One of the big sources of concern for the people we talked with,” Benenson said, “was that they didn’t recognize any new rules in this environment. All of the rules they had learned about how you succeed, how you get ahead—those rules no longer apply, and they didn’t feel there was a set of new rules.” These kinds of examinations suggest that in the age of insecurity, Americans are not just trying to weather an economic storm, but they are also feeling their way through the dark.

2 Comments
August 2, 2014

the jaded

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/seven-ages-of-love/the-seven-ages-of-love-40s-942411.html

Because no matter how hard you try to hold on to the idea that love is the only thing left in the world worth believing in the one guiding light you need and a spiritual force to be reckoned with reality is hell-bent on teasing, testing and taunting such notions into submission. And when fairy-tale notions of romance are removed, what are we left with? Is love as pragmatic as two people deciding to support each other until one of them dies? Is love a higher plain that we can ascend to via a combination of behavioural insight and tantric knowledge? Or is love, to return to the lyrics of a popular song, nothing more than “a simple prop” to occupy our time?

1 Comment
August 1, 2014

the lulling

Lulled Into Numbness

Successful movement through this Transition Zone accounts for some of the data about that upswing of happiness after the 40s, but not all. A larger source, in my experience, of later life happiness is more likely masked resignation and accommodation: People who more or less give up trying to grow and change. They decide, consciously or unconsciously, to lope along in the life they’ve been living and define that as happiness.

It’s illusory, though, because over time they tend to become “comfortably numb,” emotionally and spiritually. And, increasingly vulnerable to physical ailments, an upsurge of late-life depression, alcoholism or drug usage.

My daily meditation practice has provided me with a lot of benefits. My health has improved and I’m much calmer and more forgiving of others.

It hasn’t changed my actual circumstances though– despite the popular theory of “abundance”– and so, at the same time, I feel numb. Undeniably and remarkably numb. Numbly adapted to my circumstances.

I have trained myself not to expect romantic romantic fulfillment and not to feel disappointment over the lack of deep, meaningful friendships in my life or any kind of consistent intimacy. I have cultivated an appreciation for pleasant diversions and have stopped expecting much more than that in my time away from work. Having recently been bruised on the job market, I have stopped hoping for a job that truly engages me and instead appreciate the fact that I have one I don’t hate and that may allow me to retire early, if I hold my lifestyle steady.

All of this “accommodation” has taken a toll, but I’m unsure what choice I have. I could try online dating again, but chances are slim that anything will come of it, and I don’t particularly feel up to the psychic drain. I already participate in a number of social activities, but rarely do I meet like-minded peers. Occasionally I’m really, really enlivened by and drawn to a performer or artist of some kind, but outside of polite exchanges, nothing ever develops. I don’t see any solution to the job problem, but feel it could be greatly ameliorated by a satisfying personal life, but then that brings me back to the beginning of this paragraph.

I would like to keep growing, but I feel like I am reaching the limits of how much I can grow in solitude.

Accommodation. Resignation. I can’t see a way out.

45 Comments
July 31, 2014

the upside down

Bank-robbin’ in Brooklyn

Everything is upside down. Your life is sold to serve an economy that does not serve your life. So should you turn to crime, if you haven’t already? Do whatever it takes to avoid participating in this “construct,” risking hunger, imprisonment, or dependence on people with real jobs, who’ve learned to keep their heads down?6 Should you learn to do a better job hiding your soul from the oligarchs and make what is beautiful on nights and weekends, if you can get them, when you are not too tired, and have not drunk yourself into numb oblivion? Or should you sacrifice years of your life to educate yourself, incur massive debt,7 and “put in your time” to qualify for a job that might feel more like “creating something beautiful,” only to risk turning that very beauty into “the most soul-oppressing thing [you] can imagine,” too? Should you try to work harder, save more, get your hands on some capital, even though the game seems impossibly rigged, so that if you do work out how to make a profit, it will be incredibly difficult to do so without replicating the system of exploitation that enrages you?

[…]

What I will have to say to you, by the end of this, is that anyone who has found a way to transform anger into purpose and even some measure of peace about work has learned to reckon with two contradictory truths:

Most work seems designed to make you feel absolutely alone, and
Almost everyone, if they are honest with themselves, feels exactly like you about much of the work they do.

[..]

With my butt up in the air, I have meditated on how everything is an illusion and tried to learn to detach from my boredom with bending over, jumping back, and putting my butt up in the air, trying not to think about the possibility that one of yoga’s most important historical functions has been to help people cope with a caste system cultivated by the Aryan invaders of India in 1500 BCE and institutionalized by the British invaders in the 19th and 20th centuries, a system organized by color like South Africa during apartheid, in which the lightness of your skin coincided with your class and thus the kind of labor you might do. To believe that because you were born dark-skinned and a servant you must remain a servant until your next reincarnation is perhaps easier when you have learned to endure repetitive compulsory movements, especially when the dominant movement is to prostrate yourself with your butt up in the air, while practicing detaching from your desires. I have tried not to think about the fact that more and more Americans are finding this practice incredibly helpful, if not necessary, to keep this whole thing going.

[…]

But I suspect that for most of the members of the upper 10 percent, and even the 1 percent, the real story is different—it is the system that is exploitative, and they have chosen to fight for a position in that system that is the only way to have a kind of personal power that should be everyone’s right. Do you think that if they weren’t so scared of falling into our position, so many people would choose to work in finance, for example, an industry built, in large part, on preying on the debt of others? Employment in that sector is currently the one of the best bets for ensuring one’s basic needs are met, and sending one’s children to college, if they want to go, and getting to live where you most want to live, and traveling to other countries, and getting good health care, without going into debt. It’s not bad to want these things, it’s just that everyone should have them.

Leave a comment
July 28, 2014

the buffet

This is a major, and ridiculously exhausting, shift in how we mate as a species, the biggest, it seems, since birth control. As online dating becomes less stigmatized—just 21 percent of Internet users think online dating is “desperate,” down eight points since 2005, according to the Pew Research Center—more and more singles, hoping to meet their match, are turning to the digital world. It isn’t the age of the hook-up; it’s the age of the never-ending first date.

While any slut can game the system if he or she so pleases, bedding the city via Tinder or any number of online dating apps, what’s less often acknowledged is that regular people are going on an inordinate number of dates and getting very little—sexual or otherwise—in the process.

Read more at http://observer.com/2014/07/50000-first-dates-online-dating-makes-finding-a-partner-in-nyc-harder-than-ever/#ixzz38jffX8mV
Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook

4 Comments
July 27, 2014

boosters

Of course I advocate for four eight-hour days, not four ten-hour days, as many governments have adopted:

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/24/5_reasons_its_time_for_a_4_day_work_partner/

Let’s be honest. Being on a treadmill where all you do is work, eat and sleep, is a crappy way to live. That’s why the four-day work-week is good for morale and worker happiness. Spending more time with family and friends, pursuing hobbies and interests outside of work, and engaging with the community are all things that boost well-being and keep employees, sane, focused and committed to their jobs.

Ryan Carlson of Treehouse says he finds his workers “invigorated and excited” when they come in after a three-day weekend. He also finds that it’s easier both to recruit and retain workers with a four-day work-week policy, because their lives are more balanced and they feel much happier.

And this is one reason I’m glad I don’t have kids (from a commenter):

How many young people, if they truly understood what the future held for them, would cheerfully embark on a working life made up of a soul-killing 5/7 or more of our weekdays spent working, 50 or more weeks out of every year, for forty to fifty years?

No one at age 18 thinks that’s what’s in store for them, just like everyone thinks they’re going to become (m)(b)illionaires someday. Yet by the time we’ve figured out that this is indeed what adult life is going to be – even in jobs we love – we’re committed, locked in, and find there is no reasonable escape from a system that considers it a virtue to sacrifice family and home for work.

And self-employment offers no solutions; the self-employed usually get to work even longer hours with fewer vacations, less time for family and less hope for a comfortable retirement.

If humans are so smart, how come we can’t devise an economic system that is more humane and is a better fit for our species?

Leave a comment
July 27, 2014

scrapbooks

I’ve written about this before, but I have almost no interest in seeing movies or watching television anymore. Today I have even less interest than when I started this blog. This is probably fairly common as one ages; after all, the targeted demographic ends at age 34.

But I think there is an even bigger reason, which is that I no longer feel a part of the culture. I am at the exact midpoint of life, and this year closes the book on the first half. That tale didn’t end as expected, and I no longer believe in or identify with the major story threads promulgated by our society.

Daily meditation likely adds to this strange feeling of being outside the accepted narrative.

Blogging is probably the ideal format to tell my arc-less story. There are no big turning points or neat endings, just buffetings, false starts, recoveries back to baseline, and ferreted scraps pointing the way to fellow wanderers.

9 Comments