High Five!

Another Dec alum reminded me that today is National High Five Day, a glorious holiday that traces its humble origins to UVa circa 2002 (and more specifically, this manifesto). High five! If you're stuck at a desk and aren't feeling the fingers-and-palm connection, I recommend this video from 2005 (which admittedly isn't actually all that funny but still really made me laugh).

Portrait of a Lady

File under: Black Sheep Alumni. Harvard's Ted Kaczynski can claim he was traumatized by psychological research conducted on him as an undergraduate, and sometime Stanford student Ted Bundy can blame heartbreak, but (according to HoosOnline), UVa's eminently industrious Temeka Rachelle Lewis -- the former English major responsible for scheduling "dates" between Emperor's Club VIP clients and employees -- has only Madison House volunteer experience (and all those sordid literary classics) to blame. "She's just too clean," Lewis's stupefied uncle told the Daily News when he learned of her line of work. "Even when she does the dishes, she puts on gloves. It just don't make any sense." But the UVa English Department website's careers page tells it like it is:

The notion that English majors are unprepared for interesting, productive, lucrative employment is an unfortunate, unfounded myth.

Swiffer. Citibank. Eva Longoria.

You know, I don't even really like Hari Kunzru. But his story in this week's New Yorker is kind of brilliant. Let me qualify that: It isn't "luminous" and it isn't "prescient," and it doesn't even have a satisfying ending, but reading it definitely made me queasy (ala this classic column from Underminer Mike Albo*). Anyway, a quick taste of "Raj, Bohemian":

I was a ghost, floating through a world of moving signage, people carrying shopping bags, immigrants handing out flyers for bars and language schools.  I went into a department store, dazzled by chrome and glass and brushed steel.  It was a palace of mirrors, zombie heaven.  Girls at the makeup counter, dressed like slutty pharmacists.  Rich men with ski tans fingering cashmere sweaters.  In the housewares department was a display cabinet of knives, gleaming with surgical allure. I bought the largest and headed back up the escalator to the teeming street.

*Mike Albo also once observed that "adulthood basically involves complex and enervating tasks like Internet dating, shopping for jeans, trying to remember your 15 various log-on codes and passwords, and deciphering your Verizon bill." This is something I contemplate nearly every time I misremember a log-on code or password.

Chafing Thighs, Mental Health Days and the Like

Since it's (still) Valentine's Day. A retrospective! Back when I worked on The Dec, I would routinely coerce my friends into writing clever things. I present for your reading pleasure, two gems from February 14, 2002: Miss Ruthie in what can only be described as "not a feminist rant or a diatribe against conformity or a probing and provocative thought piece on modernity’s destruction of our sociopolitical security (sorry to get your hopes up), but rather a long winded question to which I probably won’t offer much of an answer" and Miss Katie on how to "extract a particularly rarefied species of pleasure from this bloated, sickly sweet carnival of misery, and that pleasure is righteous self-pity." Heart-warming!

Is Caitlin Flanagan Trying to Tell Me Something?

So I thought I had a sense of what to expect from Caitlin Flanagan, that sharp-witted woman-hating Wahoo. But her op-ed in today's New York Times ("Sex and the Teenage Girl") struck me as, well, pretty weird. She transitions from a quick look at Juno to some big talk about "commitment to girls" and then concludes with a bizarre anecdote about something she spotted in a high school girls bathroom: "In the last stall, carved deeply into the box reserved for used sanitary napkins, was the single word 'Please.'" This strange piece of writing stops short of being a full-on critical look at the film, or a flat-out call to action or even a wholesale emotional appeal; it proposes no new solution and offers no new insight into the issue of teen pregnancy. Instead, it's just head-scratchingly fuzzy restatement of a familiar problem. I thought that kind of writing was reserved for blogs?