Parking Cars, Headless Wonders and Book Covers

Headless Wonders at the Canberra Centre, pic by Buttontree Lane

and freakoids from Myer, by danoxster

A visit to The Canberra Centre late at night for a movie always manages to freak me out. First, Canberra is kind of a freaky place anyway, because it’s so unnaturally pristine. It is a planned city, and everything reflects that. If you let your imagination run away with you it can feel a bit like something out of Stepford Wives.

The Canberra Centre is easy to get lost in, if you’re a getting-lost-sort-of-person. Which I am. It doesn’t help that it’s a mall which spans two sides of a road, and if you forget which side of the road you were on when you parked your car, you’re screwed. There’s no way of retracing your steps when you get yourself into that sort of reflective, back-to-front muddle. Retrace your steps and you’re still hopelessly lost. I know someone who went to the Canberra Centre soon after it opened, and who didn’t realise there were two more-or-less symmetrical sides to the place. She reported her car stolen to police.

The police had never felt so useful, I’m sure, when they were able to oblige my friend by directing her to the other carpark, the one where her car sat innocently waiting for her to collect it. Apparently it happens quite a bit.

I’m not laughing, not even a little bit, because that’s the sort of thing that would happen to me. Fortunately, the worst that has ever happened to me at The Canberra Centre is losing the parking ticket somewhere between the pay machine and the car, which meant paying not only the maximum daily parking fee, but an extra fee on top of that. Like a fine, for no reason that I can think of, since it’s not possible to park in the place overnight, and an extra bit of paper for a new ticket can’t cost that much.

The other thing about losing your parking ticket just as you get to the boom gates is the exorbitant number of cars who bank up behind you at a rate you’d never noticed until that very moment. When you’re fishing around for a ticket – that isn’t there – the rest of the universe goes into overdrive, and everyone at The Canberra Centre decides it’s time to go home. I hope one of the people we managed to hold up at the boom gate was the person lined up right behind us at the pay machine, who must have got our parking ticket, because much reflection tells me that we would have left it in the machine by accident, while arguing about the movie. (If you were in that position, finding someone else’s ticket in the machine, wouldn’t you tap them on the shoulder for the sake of four bucks fifty? Wouldn’t you?)

These days I have a sort of paranoia about parking tickets. Once paid for, I watch them come out of the machine, then cling onto them for fear of grim death. The sight of a boom gate lifting to let me out of a carpark accompanies a sigh of relief, and a kind of gratitude that would be better spent on real people, for doing acts of real human kindness.

I’m also mindful of the fact that once paying for parking you only have fifteen minutes to get out of the place. I’m worried that I’ll exceed that fifteen minutes one of these days, looking for my car, fiddle fannying about with the shopping, organising the three year old, sipping water, selecting tunes for the trip home and blowing my nose. It wouldn’t be hard to do.

The other thing that freaks me out about The Canberra Centre – especially at night – are the shopfronts, which are full of headless dummies, like some madman with a chainsaw has lost his minder. (She’s probably looking for their car.)

Maybe this guy.

In Myers, the models are looking even more scary these days. They have enormous heads with blank faces. Not only that, but they are alien green. (I’ve not seen an alien, as confessed previously, but work with me here.)

pic by Tim Riley

Headless models, whether green or anglocentric flesh, exist for us to imagine ourselves in those clothes. And I’m sure this works, as long as you’re a 140cm anorexic with a bad slouch who walks around with clothes pegs in your back.

Australian author Nick Earls blogged this week about the headless models on the covers of his books, and the explanations he has been given for this. Some of the reasons are quite surprising. (I never knew publishers were so hard up that they can’t employ models from modelling agencies for the books of our best-known authors, but then again, this is Australia.)

I have a strong preference for book covers which avoid depicting a character on the front cover. In some cases, I’d rather have a fuzzy idea of someone in my mind rather than someone else’s recreation. In other cases it’s because the cover artist doesn’t seem to have had access to the manuscript before doing the cover art, and it shows. The person sometimes looks nothing like any of the characters in the book. The worst case I’ve seen is a Joanna Trollope book:

If you happen to have read this book, who the hell is that on the cover? There are two young women in the book who are about that age: one has flaming red hair; the other has a short, dark, modern cut. I kept flipping to the front wondering when this blonde character was going to crop up. She never did. Perhaps she was meant to be the mother, in her fifties. I’m sorry, but even from the back, this woman couldn’t pass for someone in her fifties. And who’s that other grumpy looking dude?

I know the world has bigger problems, but really. If artists don’t read the books they’re asked to create covers for, I think chopping heads off is a good idea.

On Queuing

pic by mdezemery

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues.

- Wikipedia

Apparently that’s a branch of mathematics. I remember asking my high school maths teachers if they could somehow articulate to me the usefulness and, according to some, the inherent interestingness of mathematics, but none of them ever did. In the years since I left school, I’ve met a number of mathematicians who seem to be studying really interesting things, and it all comes under the label of… ‘maths’ (!) and I wonder how I would approach the subject were I given the chance to do high school again. I’d not drop it at the first opportunity.

Anyhow.

Queues. The following rant is not about maths, but about etiquette. These are some jumbled observations, after a week in a heavily populated tourist area during school holiday season. Since I rarely encounter queues here at home, they always come as a culture shock, and I’m left pleased with our decision to live in the boondocks, even though it does require regular dalliances with cities to remind ourselves that living away from shops and schools is actually a good idea.

1. SUPERMARKET CHECKOUTS

As a teenager I did my time on the checkout, so I had good opportunity to observe how the queues work. I don’t want to big myself up, but I’m pretty good at picking fast lines, and here’s the trick: Look at the speed of the checkout operator rather than at the size of the trolley loads. Doubly so when you’re shopping at a supermarket where that slow-as-a-wet-week-checkout-operator packs the groceries for you.

There’s slightly more to it than that, of course. Some customers are more likely to strike up a conversation with the checkout operator than others. This is a small town, so I know the type. If I’m in a hurry I try not to queue behind them.

Supermarket queues are inevitable and there’s little difference between a long queue and a short queue – in the scheme of things. Nevertheless, there are a couple of things that make me scratch my head, especially since most people would consider themselves polite.

When a queue gets too long, and starts weaving into the aisles, a staff member will often decide to open another cash register. There might be three or four customers who have not yet put their groceries on the conveyor belt, but more often than not, who’s first at the head of the new queue? The customer who joined the line last. There’s a mad rush to the newly opened checkout, based not upon who has been waiting the longest, but who first noticed the new line opening.

I think this is bad etiquette, so if the person ahead of me hasn’t noticed the new queue, I ask if they’d like to go ahead of me in the new line. Not once has this been reciprocated. I wonder how it works in other countries. Australians are very polite in many situations, but not when it comes to queues. They’ll complain about the Japanese before admitting Australians have their very own queuing issues.

Another point on checkout etiquette: A while ago I allowed a woman to go ahead of me because I had a week’s worth of groceries and she had an armload. She thanked the checkout operator. Etiquette fail.

Expresshole: The ***hole in the express lane at the store who has way more items in his cart than the limit for the lane.

- from the sniglets entry at Wikipedia

2. TRAFFIC QUEUES

It seems my own sense of etiquette is a bit different from that of many drivers’, to the point where I wonder if it’s me who has it all wrong.

If I’m driving on a double laned road and I see a car ahead of me indicating to get into my following distance, I’ll drop back and let them in. A lot of other people don’t work like that. It’s as if they think, ‘Fuck it, you should have been in this lane all along’, and instead of dropping back a few metres, they speed up to make sure they get past. The merging car may or may not miss their turn-off.

No one changes lanes for fun. We change lanes because we need to go where we need to go, and changing lanes in high density traffic is a pain in the butt when other drivers won’t let you in. Some cities are worse than others for this. Anyhow, I just found out The Gold Coast is particularly bad, and I’ll have to revise my regular mantra about the discourtesy of Canberra drivers.

There’s an inverse relationship between traffic density and driver lane courtesy, perhaps. In Sydney and Melbourne, where the traffic is much more dense, you sometimes need to change lanes immediately after joining a road, because you’ll need to turn off right away, and drivers are more likely to accept you barging on in, because they will need to change lanes themselves before long. It’s all reciprocal.

Dropping back is not just a matter of courtesy, however. It’s a defensive driving tactic. If you speed up rather than let someone merge in front, you can’t rely on that merging driver to check their blind spot. They may not have seen you zooming up behind – and even if they have seen you, how do you trust they won’t just barge on over anyway? You can’t predict the nature of a driver. I can’t understand why there aren’t more accidents, really. I’d like to know what proportion of commuter accidents are caused by drivers refusing to let other drivers into a queue. I hear ‘blind spot’ accidents are pretty common, but it’s driver impatience that’s the issue.

Driving tests should require psychometric profiling as well as a demonstration of basic car manoeuvring. That way we might keep assholes off the road, and that’d be more use than this increasingly lengthy and tedious licensing system we’ve got in place now. (Has the road toll actually improved any, since requiring new drivers to spend 3 years on provisional?) Yep. What we need is an asshole test, every two years, in order to keep your licence.  Our countries are run by people who have been profiled, so why not spread the joy? We’d have no choice but to create better infrastructure for public transport, because many households wouldn’t have a licence-worthy member among them, and this would have the doubly positive effect of improving the environment.

3. PRIORITY QUEUES

In an increasingly hierarchical, user-pays society, I’m not at ease with priority queuing.

When I booked our airfares, we were given the option to pay 5 dollars extra per person for ‘priority queuing‘, which means you get to board first. I’m not sure of the point of this. Everyone gets to the destination at exactly the same time. Perhaps this one extravagance helps economy class passengers to imagine what it might be like to be a first class passenger. (Without the leg room, I might add.) I would much prefer that we go back to common sense, and allow children and disabled passengers to board first, regardless of who’s the most cash-strapped. (I don’t think this is because I personally have a child  - we actually boarded last, which is just as good as first – my bum in someone else’s face rather than the other way round.  It’s because small children create a lot of extra work for the adults who have to get them settled.)

Even at Dreamworld (The Gold Coast equivalent of Disneyland), patrons can pay an extra fee which allows them to jump ahead in a queue. Since the most popular queues were several hours long last week, I suspect many patrons were taking advantage of this. I didn’t realise until after we’d left that it was even a thing.

Probably because it goes against my own sense of justice.

On the one one hand, those people have paid ten dollars extra, so deserve something for their money. On the other, I would personally really hate to jump a queue. I’d hate to elbow through the crowd, saying, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, I have a priority ticket. Can I just squeeze through here?’, showing off my priority wristband. I just couldn’t do it happily. Those people were there first, so they deserve to be there.

Besides, what if everyone purchased the priority ticket? That would be Dreamworld’s Dream – the takings would be far better, and no one would experience any real value for money. The wait would be just as long. Worse, what if 90 percent of patrons bought the priority ticket? Ten percent of patrons would never get on any rides at all.

Related Link: Dinosaur Comics does the word ‘queue’.

In Defence of Computer Guys

t-shirts from ThinkGeek, in case you need one.

Warning: contains generalisations.

After six months at TAFE studying networking and programming I realised I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing that, and I had just enough computer knowledge to get a job working on a computer, so I left it at that.

It wasn’t time wasted by any means. I learnt a lot about computers after six months’ full-time study. I learnt that I know nothing compared to all there is to know.

I learnt that people who work with computers deserve the money they get. Some people in other professions get ‘dirt money’ or ‘danger money’. Many computer people get a sort-of-equivalent. I call it ‘boredom money’. For me, trawling through basic code searching for a bug was a specific kind of torture of the magnitude I’d never encountered before. I thought I’d be good at programming because my first degree was in Japanese. Sure enough, I could do the code, but computer language, as it turns out, is nothing like human language at all.

I realised that although jobs in programming require years of education and a difficult degree, not to mention years of workplace experience, the paradox is that for much of an actual working day, educated and intelligent people are doing highly repetitive work. That’s probably why my husband calls himself a code monkey. Sitting in an office cubicle (or quite often in a basement) for 8 hours per day 5 days per week must be kind of like sitting in the controversial white room on Big Brother Australia: psychological torment. Of course, jobs in computers aren’t alone in this. Tim Flannery in his book Here On Earth argues a good case that since humans are getting more specialised we are therefore more stupid, and a lot more bored.

I also learnt that in order to do well in computers my entire life would have to start revolving around computers: talking about computers, opening up computers and poking around inside computers, building computers, troubleshooting computers… Unless I were to take a certain pleasure in that way of life then that course was not for me, because many of my classmates were living just like that. Those are the students who get the most rewarding jobs in computers. They’re the ones who get home from a hard day’s work programming and write apps to wind down.

My husband does just that. He is what I call a bona fide computer guy.

This leads me to the most important reason why I’m glad I did that six months at TAFE, learning how to (break then) fix computers: For the rest of my life I will have a respect for my husband that I might not have had otherwise.

Computer guys are a widely misunderstood bunch.

And I know, computer people are not all guys. But for some reason there far fewer women who choose to go into careers in computing, and even fewer white women. In my programming and networking class of 20, 3 were women. One Thai exchange student, one Indian immigrant and me. That’s a topic for a different post.

Turns out most people don’t have the foggiest clue what it means to work with computers at a low level. (And by ‘low’ I mean you’re not just using the software created for you by other people; you’re writing the code that makes the software.)

I can’t say I know either, because my husband doesn’t have the sort of job that creates interesting conversation of an evening. It’s not like, say, teaching, which is one of those jobs that gives you plenty to run with. There’s always some funny thing a kid did or said that you can recount to your nearest and dearest after a day at work, but for my husband, it was either a ‘quiet’ day or a ‘busy’ day at work, and that’s the extent of our conversation. I don’t really know what he does. He’s got one of those jobs (and there are many, granted) where he hates telling people what he does for a living. He tells them he works for a phone company, and if he’s lucky they’ll leave it at that, but people never do, because you can’t tell anything about a person from that. For all they know, he could be selling mobile phones in a shop front, or maybe he’s one of those people whose job it is to call people on their spanking new mobile phones asking if they’re happy with their plans…

So he tells interested strangers that he works on part of a team at a centre of billing services responsible for creating customised databases for corporate customers.

That’s a conversation stopper.

Every now and then he meets another ‘computer guy’ and here’s a funny thing I’ve noticed about computer guys – against popular opinion (or intuition), computer guys don’t really like talking for hours on end about computer stuff.

Here’s why.

Computer guys, for the most part, are not all that interested in their jobs. Almost without fail they have a specific passion which involves computers, but no one – no matter how much they love computers – really likes working on a helpdesk. No one likes fixing other people’s computer problems. Computer guys don’t really enjoy talking about computers at all… unless it’s with other computer guys who share their own specific set of interests. It’s not much fun for them, explaining to a networking-virgin how to set up a wireless modem. Many computer guys are better at doing than explaining, so it’s way easier for them to just do it themselves, but then, you see, next time something goes wrong they’re the first guy called to the job.

And this is why we should be careful about what we ask of the Computer Guy in our lives. We all have someone: A neighbour, a son, a brother… There’s usually someone we can ask when something goes wrong with our computer.

I’m only implicated here insofar as people ask me if my husband can fix their computer. I’ve learnt enough acting as the reluctant go-between to have reached a certain understanding and here are some examples of what not to do to your Computer Guy.

1. LOADED DINNER INVITATIONS

When extended family members invited us around for dinner it was ostensibly to meet me for the first time, but also because there was an ‘issue’ with their family computer.

“So,” said the cousin-in-law after we’d been chatting for a while. “Are you going to take a look at this computer, or what?”

“Sure,” said my husband, who is never less than cordial.

They emerged from the study a few minutes later. I overheard my husband telling the cousin-in-law that he should probably just go ahead and upgrade his computer. As we left that evening, I suggested to our hosts that we get together for a barbecue next time, which was met with lack of enthusiasm, to say the least. In the car, I asked why he’d advised the new computer, when usually in that situation I know he could have fixed it… in an hour or two of tedious trawling through logs and whatnot.

“Yeah, I could’ve fixed it,” he said. “And if I’d been asked with respect, I might have.”

We never went around there for dinner again. (For the record, we weren’t invited. No one likes to hear that they need to upgrade their computer… when they suspect it could actually be fixed. After all, we made him DINNER, dammit!)

I therefore feel uncomfortable when a dinner invitation just happens to require a pre-dinner dalliance into the computer room. That’s why you need to be super-careful when offering dinner in that situation. For you, it may seem fair trade. But for the Computer Guy (and his partner) it can feel like obligatory socialisation, and it’s much like being invited to ‘a party’ only to find out it’s a Tupperware party. It’s just not a nice thing to do to people.

2. FAILURE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT *ENTHUSIASM FOR COMPUTERS* DOES NOT MEAN *ENTHUSIASM FOR FIXING Yours*.

Ah, Computer Guy loves computers so he won’t mind spending three hours trawling through mine in order to fix this thing I did when I tried to compress my hard drive because I’m too cheap ass to buy more disk space and too damn lazy to back up my stuff.

I’ve yet to meet someone who loves to fix other people’s computers for fun.

Okay, so I didn’t personally find fixing computers fun, and there are certainly people out there who find it more fun that I ever did, and it’s possible I’m projecting… but when someone does that for a job it rapidly loses its appeal. Computer Guys don’t necessarily fix computers for a living even if they happen to know how, but that still doesn’t mean they find it fascinating. Even someone who’s interested in tricking up his own computer probably isn’t that interested in yours… unless it’s really really special. (And his own will be newer and more exciting than yours, guaranteed.)

3. FAILURE TO DO AS COMPUTER GUY SAYS, EVEN THOUGH YOU ASKED.

A friend of mine was having trouble with her computer and asked me to run her problems past my husband. So I did. He said what I thought he’d say: “That computer’s really old and is behaving exactly like it’s about to conk out. Tell her she needs to definitely back up her stuff.”

So I did.

And she didn’t. Because some people haven’t understood the following concept: It’s not if your computer conks out; it’s when.

Sure enough, a few months later, she rang up in a panicked state (there’s always panic), because the computer had given up the ghost. She had some really, really special photos on there and also a poem her daughter had written which was also really special and she needed to somehow get them off the hard drive.

Yeah. Most of the time Computer Guys can get stuff off your hard drive even when your computer has conked out, but this is a real pain in the arse, really time consuming and the fact that this CAN be done is no reason at all to avoid backing up your stuff. Funny how things multiply in value once they’re no longer accessible.

If the Computer Guy tells you to back up your stuff because your computer’s about to conk out, do it. Do it anyway. And if you don’t, and your computer conks out just like he said it would, then’s a good time to find a different Computer Guy, because Original Computer Guy doesn’t want to know.

And if the Computer Guy tells you to get virus protection, you should get the virus protection he recommends and you should pay money for that, even though you know the teenagers living in your house aren’t going to dodgy sites.

3. INGRATITUDE

On holiday, a family member asked my husband to configure his computer so he could get internet via their laptop onto a new iPad. My husband did this happily, because when family asks you to do something, you do it if you can.

It took three hours, but he did it.

The next day, the internet started dropping out. My husband knows a lot about networking and he knew that this was nothing to do with the computer,and certainly nothing to do with what he’d done to the computer. It was to do with reception, or possibly the ISP. Our family member wouldn’t accept this, though, and grumbled to the tune of ‘You fucked up my laptop you fucker’, even though the problem miraculously resolved itself the next day, proving beyond a doubt that it had been a reception issue… as my husband knew all along.

If you trust the Computer Guy with your beloved gadgets… enough to hand them over and let him spend three hours fixing it for you ON HOLIDAY then you need to extend that trust a smidgen further, which means believing him when he tells you he did not fuck up your computer. There are Computer Guys around who will definitely fuck up your computer if you ask them to fix your gear for free, in which case you kinda get what you deserve.

4. misdirected panic

I really envy Computer Guys because they know so much about computers that they never panic when things go wrong. Unlike the rest of us, their blood pressure doesn’t rise when they find their computers have been riddled with seventy three nasty viruses. Instead, they sigh – or not – and know that they’ll have to just go on ahead and fix it this evening. If their stuff ‘goes missing’ they rest easy in the knowledge that ‘it’s in there somewhere’ and they’ll find it if they keep looking. If their $3000 computer won’t turn on, they have the troubleshooting skills to work out whether it’s the graphics card that’s died or the power supply. (They probably have a wardrobe full of spare parts which they refuse to throw away for exactly these reasons.)

As someone who’s married to The Neighbourhood Computer Guy, some of this relaxed attitude has rubbed off on me, because I haven’t yet seen a problem my Computer Guy hasn’t been able to fix. (And in full disclosure, the better he is, the lazier I get.)

But I certainly know what it is to have that sinking feeling. The fact is, nothing is really as bad as it seems, so there’s no good reason to call your Computer Guy at strange hours of the day and night. In most cases, a virus riddled computer will still be virus riddled and just as fixable tomorrow morning. A computer which you dropped on the kitchen floor will still be dropped tomorrow morning. And as any fans of The IT Crowd should know by now, it’s amazing what happens when you turn it off and on again.

It’s possible Computer Guys see panic more often than most of us. They’re often at the pointy end of panic in the workplace, where things really can be important – and by ‘important’ I mean costing millions of dollars per day – so it’s best not to call your Neighbourhood Computer Guy with that all-too-familiar panicked voice just because your sons can’t get their Xbox onto the network and they’re driving you insane.

5. GENERAL DERISION OF GEEKS AND DESK JOBS

This is most evident when in the company of people who work with their hands for a living. On the one hand, it’s understandable that some of these guys feel a bit short changed. After all, they come home feeling physically drained, stinking of oil or dirt or whatever. Computer Guys, on the other hand, rarely break into a sweat. Back in high school the geeks were never a threat; they amused themselves in the library at lunchtimes. No one ever thought personal computers would take off, and that you’d be needing to rely on these guys, not just for fixing your home computer when your teenage son fucks it up but also to hook up your internet cordy thingos, and for some reason your goddam TV. (These days it seems you need a Certificate 3 in Audiovisuals to turn on a bit of telly. At least, if you want to listen to it along with the picture show…)

The white collar/blue collar division is nothing new, granted; nor is the idea that Real Men Work With Their Hands. But I suspect the divide is turning into a chasm.

It’s easy to think that, unlike tradies, who do useful things like wire up your lights and unblock your drains – ie.  jobs which anyone can appreciate at a simplistic level – these Computer Guys, with their late-model gadgets and rapidly diminishing mortgages don’t really deserve the money they’re earning; after all, what the hell do they do all day? Don’t computer guys just sit behind a desk and type? And it’s all gobbledegook, at that.

I’ve been attendant at gatherings where there is open derision of Computer Guys and their ilk. My husband never says anything, but I know what he thinks. The point is, if you’ve completed a degree which few people manage to complete, and you’re doing a job that few people can stick at – and which even fewer Australian born people are willing to do – then who are the rest of us to complain? It’s impossible to imagine all of those really specific ‘invisible’ jobs that exist and which keep the cogs turning, in which the fruit of labour exists only as ‘air’ – on hard drives, in ‘the cloud’, backed up each night on servers. This is all vital work which few ever see. These guys break a different kind of sweat. It’s a different kind of hard, working with your brain all day, some days under intense pressure and sometimes with immense boredom because you’re waiting on a job, or because the job you have to do is inherently tedious and personally unsatisfying. If you’re like me and have ever done a job which required lots of waiting around you’ll appreciate what a torture it is to look busy. Looking busy is actually worse than being busy and believe it or not, more tiring. (We need more workplaces which are open to the idea that some workers are going to be waiting around at some points, due to the nature of their jobs, and instead of requiring such people to look busy, perhaps we should be nurturing their creativity and right-to-humanness by providing ping-pong tables in the basement… or whatever.)

Related Link: The Dunning-Kruger effect

There’s a more general message here though, of which I wasn’t fully cognizant before I met my husband:

We tend to underestimate the complexity of fields we know absolutely nothing about.

Each of us is fully aware of the complexities in our own area of expertise. I’d wager anyone with any expertise has encountered others who underestimate all that’s involved. But in the case of your typical Computer Guy this underestimation is magnified, simply because of the degree of specialisation that’s required.

Jobs in many areas are becoming super-specialised, which makes it all the more important that we are each aware of the fact that, increasingly, we’ll have absolutely no idea of what our neighbours do for a living. The trick is not to try and understand the Computer Guy’s job over the course of a dinner, or a drink at the pub, but rather to understand – in general – that the Computer Guy’s job is just as important as your own job, regardless of whether you personally understand it or not.

I’ll end by stressing that most people are decent when it comes to asking for help with computers, and my Computer Guy is genuinely happy to help out when he knows his efforts are genuinely appreciated. Most of us have no choice but to rely on our Computer Guys now and then, and it’s genuine appreciation that’s key. I suspect in most cases, that’s all a Lovely Computer Guy requires.

Noisy Noise Noise… NOISE!

by holly northrop

Last week I visited a brand spanking new library which opened locally. It’s impressive, all right. There are literary quotes woven into the carpet, big red armchairs which allow patrons to look from an enormous window to the street outside, numerous standup computer terminals, and flash decor which feels like something between an airport departure lounge and a Borders bookstore.

There is also a sizeable children’s play area, smack bang in the middle of the library, with furniture designed for romping and a data projector on the ceiling depicting giant, foot-sized ants onto a paddling-pool sized rectangle of carpet below. No amount of squinting at the ceiling allowed me to work out how this works, but if you stand on the ants, they get ‘squished’ and disappear; a satisfying ‘bug-squish’ sound reverberates throughout the library space.

‘Satisfying’ if you’re a kid, that is.

If you’re at this library to study — and you might well be, because it’s attached to a community learning institution — you can always take refuge in one of the glassed-in study rooms which have also been provided.

I was glad to see those. Because despite being the owner of a three-year-old, and also of an open plan house with wooden floors, my tolerance for noise isn’t that high. I need regular periods of peace and quiet.

Sometimes I say this and feel all alone in my age group.

It’s usually people several decades older than me writing  in to local newspapers bemoaning the cacophony of pop music piped through cheap speakers in shopping centres ‘these days’.

It’s usually the retired and the out-of-touch who speak disapprovingly of ‘young mothers’ who won’t make any effort to keep their children orderly in restaurants and movie theatres.

But these old grumps have a point.

THE urban WORLD IS BUILT FOR THOSE WHO don’t mind NOISE.

There is ever-increasing acceptance of individual difference: sexualities/eating preferences/body shapes, but are we equally schooled up on our own individual learning types, and as part of that, of our individual reactions to noise?

I’ve noticed three broad types of people in this world:

1. Feels invigorated when surrounded by external stimuli.

Others might call it noise, but competing sounds are instead processed as excitement. This sort of person is often drawn to nightclubs, big cities, music concerts, crowded pubs. Much prefers watching sports events as one of a crowd. Loves mardi gras. But this sort of person can feel lonely without some sort of external stimulus, and is inclined to switch on the television when returning home to an empty house, even if they’re not actually watching it. Can feel uncomfortable with lulls in a conversation, and conversational style reflects that: Will repeat oneself, interrupt others or add fillers before allowing gaps in dialogue with people they don’t know well. Type ones can think and talk at the same time. Indeed, thinking is talking.

2. Ambivalent about noise.

Type two is able to retreat into their own mind regardless of external stimuli. Would probably choose to live in the suburbs, where intermittent trips to the city provide occasional excitement. Can study in a cafe, or while listening to a radio, though may have personal preferences requiring white noise or music without lyrics for certain types of work.

3. Needs silence.

This sort of person — often called an introvert — feels most invigorated after a period of solitude. The minimum amount of time preferred varies from person to person — it might be 20 minutes a day, or it might stretch to hours. This sort of person can become frustrated when living with others who need noise, because radios and televisions running in the background interrupt private thoughts and feel like an intrusion. These people most likely live in urban areas (because most people these days are urban dwellers) but their idea of a holiday is more likely to be somewhere less bustling, not more bustling, than their regular daily life. Their best thinking is done when external stimuli is at a minimum. Some people of this type can feel harried during fast paced conversations, and will utilise silences in a conversation as thinking time.

I’m type number three.

I think this is the least understood type, and also the type less and less catered for, in a world where we are all expected to just put up with sounds inflicted upon us by others.

A FEW DISTURBING TRENDS

1. Forced Exposure to Music

It’s true that you can’t go into certain shops — especially clothing stores — without music blaring loudly from the speakers.  No matter — I can avoid clothing stores bar a few times per year, when it’s in and out for me. (I don’t enjoy clothes shopping. I can also tell you, after having worked in a women’s clothing store, that most women don’t enjoy clothes shopping. Many women enjoy having shopped. There’s a difference.)

Unless you’re also type three, however, you may not have noticed the constant noise over loud speakers in a supermarket. I can’t understand why workers in large shops still think it’s necessary to talk to each other over the loud speaker. Pagers were invented ages ago. Why not make use of those instead, clipping them onto the belt of your work pants at the start of each shift, along with your name badge? Customer service training might require etiquette about not checking a pager until after dealing with a customer, but surely an entire supermarket full of shoppers doesn’t really need to know that a price on Durex ribbed is required at checkout number nine, or that someone spilt a yoghurt in aisle five.

Also, as a type three individual, I would add that low-volume music piped through cheap speakers is even more irritating than music played loudly on high quality speakers. Basically, unless I’m listening to my own music, selected and paid for by myself, I don’t want to hear anybody else’s music. I don’t even want to hear my own favourite music when it’s forced upon me as I’m trying to work out how much change I’m owed from a fifty. Besides, nothing but nothing sounds good coming out of supermarket speakers, especially when it’s punctuated by incomprehensible mumblings from middle management.

Those who need the background stimulus of music while shopping for soap and spuds have always got the option of ear buds. Those of us who prefer quiet don’t have any choice in the matter. There’s a problem with that. (Of course, I can’t write any of this without sounding like Shocked and Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.)

2. Education Policies Which Promote Technological Literacy and Student Centred Learning… At the Expense of Peace and Quiet

Is it just me, or have schools become noisier?

With caveats, computers in schools are a great thing. Within the next decade I predict all students in this country will be making use of laptops during lessons and reading books from tablets and e-readers. Many already do.

What concerns me about some of the software being produced for these devices is that some developers assume bells and whistles (mindless sound effects, in other words) will grab students’ attention and lead to greater engagement with the learning material.

This is a dangerous assumption and I’d like to see more research into it. The vocab training software I used several years ago in the foreign language classroom required each student make use of personal earphones. The computer lab was next to the library, and one day, while taking an English class in the library, I overheard a relief teacher in there, using the same software with someone else’s class, unaware that the headphones were hidden inside the cupboard. The noise coming out of that room was horrendous, yet none of the students thought to tell the teacher where to find the headphones. I told her myself, mainly because I — alone? — couldn’t put up with the noise coming into the library for our ‘silent, sustained reading’ session. (SSR is a well-known concept in New Zealand. I suspect it’s one of the few intervals in a school day where type three students get a 20 minute period in which to enjoy the thoughts going on inside their own heads.)

I did wonder what proportion of the students in that noisy class of 25 would have fit into type three, like me, and therefore found it impossible to concentrate on the task at hand. None of them had said anything. This software was designed to promote vocab memorisation, and after years of studying foreign language myself, I know that I can’t do this when surrounded by noise. I acknowledge that not everyone is like me — many of my university classmates said they could only study with some sort of background noise, and preferred the cafe over the library. That’s okay. The world caters for that. What about the rest of us? What are the proportions of type threes in a typical classroom?

It concerns me that schools aren’t offering enough quiet time in the school day. With emphasis on group work, and co-operation and peer-teaching, it can sound terribly old-fashioned to insist that a class work in silence at all — indeed, it’s very draining to enforce, because many students aren’t used to it now, so a teacher must have complete control of classroom management — but I think there are more students distracted by background noise than we realise.

They may not know it themselves. Maybe no one ever told them it’s okay to need silence. Instead, I see some ‘forward thinking’ principals keen to see students making full use of technology in the classroom, and this often includes listening to music as they work. It’s a mark of comradeship, to share a single pair of ear buds with the classmate sitting next to you. It wouldn’t be easy for a kid to opt out of such an invitation.

But not all students work well while listening to music — and despite some evidence that certain types of classical music promote certain types of thinking — actually, you know, not many students are listening to that. I fear it’s become almost nerdy (and not in a good way) for a student to require silence during class. Besides, if students aren’t getting silence at school, are they getting it at home?*

*There’s increasing evidence that high school students aren’t getting enough sleep, and I suspect it’s because they’re reclaiming ‘me-time’ in their own rooms late at night, because that’s the only time they get to be inside their own heads over the course of a typical school day. Is it possible that we’re overstimulating our teenagers?

I do wonder how many doctors, lawyers and physicists spent the bulk of their study hours listening to music. The law library at my university was one of the few places you could go if you wanted to be sure of silence — the furrow-browed law students poring over their books ensured it by scaring noisy intruders away with the stink eye. I’m inclined to think that, even for thinkers who do okay on music, that there are certain complex ideas which can really only be processed after deep and prolonged time to oneself.

Silent time. Silent time and more sleep.

Might educational outcomes really be improved by focusing on something as simple as that?

Related Link: City Life Could Change Your Brain For The Worse.

Movie Time

Buggy acted like a maid. Housework, digging in the yard, and going to mass, that’s all the woman did. Always said she had too much work to do.

- Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells

The other day I overheard two mothers discussing how little time they have.

“Oh ya,” said one. “I haven’t seen a movie since I had my first child.”

“Oh na,” said the other, “neither have I.”

“I make a point of watching movies each and every week,” said I.

No actually I didn’t say that – not out loud.

Why are movies used as a barometer of someone’s busyness, and therefore their general usefulness and dog-tiredness, and by extension their piousness and general worth as a human being?

Maybe these women don’t even want to watch movies, especially. That’s possible. Not everyone is in love with movies. I came to them quite late, myself, developing a love for film sometime in my mid twenties.

Anyone (living in a rich country) who wants to watch movies makes time to watch a movie. Likewise reading, television, exercise, cooking dinner and weeding the garden.

If tired people want to get together and bemoan their lack of time, then a bit of sympathy might be all that’s required, but can’t someone think of something more original than lack of movie time to whinge about?

And if you want to watch a movie… Sit down and watch a movie. The housework can go to hell.

What is YA chick-lit doing to our girls?

First, a disclaimer: There is a lot of great YA fiction. Terry Pratchett, Melina Marchetta, John Marsden, Geraldine McCaughrean, etc. etc. It’s out there for young adults to cherish, if they know where to look.

Then there’s another kind of YA literature, heavily marketed at adolescent girls. Much of this is extremely popular and widely enjoyed. I’m not disputing that.

I’m talking about a subcategory of indulgent proto-chick-lit, whose main characters are pseudo-kiss-ass girls, but who pedal several very scary ideas about Beauty:

Rule 1. Heroines are Beautiful

For a definition of Beauty, I am not talking about the kind of beauty which is common to young, healthy people. I mean the capitalised “Beauty” found inside speech marks: the Naomi Wolf sense of the word — that which is held up as a platonic ideal in Western culture, and which only a small number of women can ever achieve.

A modern YA heroine is indeed allowed to look ‘average’, but her lack of Beauty is so often not the case. So often, the character undergoes a makeover. Take Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, a tomboyish, muscular, kick-ass girl. Yet when she gets her makeover scene – right before the hunger games, it turns out she was a Beautiful girl after all, hidden under ordinary garb.

Glasses don’t make a Beautiful girl any less Beautiful. I’m sick of that trope. Oh, and what happens when she gets a make-over? The glasses go. As observed by Natalie at her youtube Community Channel. (A great channel, by the way.)

Perhaps more damaging, especially for Beautiful girls, is the idea that beauty is the one real thing you have, and that ‘being’ is more important than ‘doing’. Caitlin Moran summarises her own teenaged self succinctly when she writes:

As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13^th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things… happened. Some kind of souped-up princess, with a credit card. I didn’t have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning life’s big lessons, or, most importantly, finding out what I was good at, and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do at some point, and that I shouldn’t really worry about them. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do.

What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things. I thought my big tasks were discovering my ‘Love Style’ via questionnaires in Cosmopolitan, assembling a capsule wardrobe, learning how to go from day to night with the application of heels and lipstick, finding a signature perfume, planning when to have a baby, and learning how to be mesmerically sexually proficient – but without getting a reputation as a total slag.

- Catilin Moran, How To Be A Woman

 

Rule 2. Heroines obsesss over physical insecurities

Heroines are far more likely to worry about their Beauty than about their brains. The more beautiful a heroine, the more insecurities she must harbour. This echoes real life.

3. other Characters will respond positively to a heroine’s physical Beauty…

…even if the heroine doesn’t realise she’s Beautiful. Especially if she doesn’t realise she’s Beautiful. So many heroines don’t think they are attractive to others, even when the reactions of others – namely boys – show that others obviously don’t think so.

This is an especially dangerous interplay, because on the surface it doesn’t seem wrong. An optimist might say of such storylines, ‘Well, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s entirely possible that a heroine does not fit the Western Beauty Ideal, and that other characters are responding to her inner beauty instead.’

I’m no optimist, because I don’t think that’s how it’s interpreted by adolescent girls. You see, in their lives, they know damn well it’s the Beautiful girls who do get the attention, and you can’t easily change their minds about this, especially when they go to watch the movie adaptations of stories about ‘average’ looking girls in books.

It’s significant that the movie adaptations of ‘average’ looking characters such as Mia, from The Princess Diaries, are portrayed on the big screen by the Ann Hathaways of this world, and the Hermiones by the Emma Watsons.

Now for some examples.

This sampling is by no means broad, but I did pick it off a shelf sort of at random – based on the fact that I’d heard of these books before.

First, the opening of the All New Nancy Drew, #9 of a series. It is called Secret of the Spa. This is a New York Times Best Selling Series, according to its cover, and was published 2005. I would like to draw your attention to the amount of airspace devoted to Beauty. (Bold, mine.)

“Nancy? Nancy? Earth to Nancy Drew!”

I blinked, snapping out of a daydream as I picked at some lint in my bedroom carpet. “Sorry, Bess,” I said, swallowing a yawn. “What were you saying?”

Bess Marvin, one of my best friends, dipped her nail polish wand into the bottle of pink liquid on the desk in front of her and studied me. She propped one bare foot on the edge of my desk.

“Weren’t you listening to what I just said, Nancy?” she demanded.

My other best friend, George Fayne, smirked and rolled over on my bed. “Poor Nancy had probably passed out from the nail polish fumes.” George waved one hand in front of her face and wrinkled her nose.

Bess rolled her eyes. Even though she and George are cousins, they couldn’t be more different. If Bess is everyone’s idea of the perfect girl, with her blond hair and pretty, feminine dresses, George defines the word tomboy. She keeps her dark hair cropped short — wash-’n-wear hair, as she calls it — and lives in jeans and sneakers.

I fall somewhere in the middle of the two of them. I’m nowhere near as interested in clothes and makeup as Bess — I’m lucky if I remember to dab on a little lip gloss most days. And I occasionally might even forget to comb my hair before leaving the house. On the other hand I don’t mind doing a little shopping now and then, or putting on a pretty skirt and some makeup for a special date with my boyfriend, Ned.

Somehow, though, despite all our differences, our three-way friendship works. George and I do our best to tolerate Bess’s incurable love of clothes, Bess and I try to look interested when George starts rambling on about the latest computer gadget she wants to buy, and the two of them are always ready to help out with my own favorite hobby — solving mysteries.

What are girl readers to think, when the most important thing about Nancy Drew and her friends is the way they look and dress? I’ve quoted from the opening passage, which is significant, because the underlying message is clear: Nancy Drew may be an intelligent, shrewd detective, an improbable role-model with many talents, but the most important thing you must know — before you know ANYTHING else, is that Nancy Drew is sort of interested in clothes but not enough to make her one of THOSE girls, all beauty an no brains, but not tomboyish enough to make her a proto-Lesbian called George — strangely reminiscent of a character in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series.

On my own bookshelf, I also have one of the 1970s wave of Nancy Drew mysteries. Here is the opening to The Mystery of the Fire Dragon (1973):

“What else does Ned say, Nancy?” Mr Drew asked. He was listening intently to a letter his daughter was reading.

“Ned likes being a college exchange student in Hong Kong, and he has actually learned to speak some Cantonese, Dad!”

“Excellent. That, together with his study of Chinese culture, should make him very valuable in a number of fields,” Mr Drew commented.

Nancy nodded. “He’d like to go into the United States Intelligence Service.” Suddenly her serious mood changed. “Dad, listen to this.” She read, ” ‘Nancy, can’t you find a mystery to solve in this far-off colony, so I might show you around?’”

Mr Drew’s eyes twinkled. “Mystery or no mystery, Nancy, you just might get to Hong Kong sooner than you think!”

“What!” the attractive blue-eyed girl exclaimed. “You mean–?”

Before Nancy could finish the question, the telephone rang and she went to answer it.

“Aunt Eloise!” Nancy cried out. “How super to hear from you! Are you in New York?”

“Yes, right in my apartment. I want you to rush here. A most peculiar thing has happened. A real mystery for you to solve.”

The young blonde detective was intrigued and could hardly wait to get the details from her aunt.

As you can see, it was important in 1973 that Nancy Drew was ‘attractive’. We can’t have a YA heroine who isn’t attracive – not in 1973 and not now.

In 1973, it was also significant that Nancy Drew’s hair was blonde and that she had blue eyes, and I do believe race relations have improved since then. (A bit. Thanks to Oprah et al.)

But has feminism done its job? I don’t think so. In the 1973 version, the book opens at least with a functional conversation between Nancy and her father. The reader is plunged straight into the action of the story, which suggests the story itself — what Nancy does, rather than what she looks like — will be the most important thing about her.

In the 2005 version, Nancy’s main concern is how she looks for her boyfriend: “I don’t mind doing a little shopping now and then, or putting on a pretty skirt and some makeup for a special date with my boyfriend, Ned.’

I find that sentence pretty offensive, myself, especially in a best selling story published 2005. I prefer that the 1970s version opens with a conversation between Nancy and her father. Perhaps more girls had great relationships with their fathers back in the 1970s. I do wonder.

Just in case I picked an especially bad example from the All New Nancy Drew Series, I picked another at random. This one is called Mardi Gras Masquerade, published 2008, and it opens like this:

“Ow!” I shrieked. “You’re killing me!”

“Chill out, Nancy.” My friend Bess Marvin tugged at the zipper on the back of my dress. “Now, hold your breath.”

I sucked in my stomach. Bess gave one last yank, and the zipper slid up without pinching any more skin.

Exhaling a sigh of relief, I turned toward the full-length mirror in the corner of my bedroom.

“Okay,” I said, surveying my reflection. “That was worth it. This dress is totally amazing.”

Bess came over and stood beside me. “We could both pass for Mardi Gras queens,” she said with a smile.

Blech. The not-so-sub subtext reads: It doesn’t matter how brilliant a girl is at solving mysteries, women must suffer to look good. Even if she exudes the natural beauty of youth, she must suck in her stomach and put on a pretty dress. Only then may she look in the mirror and be pleased with what she sees.

And what about that last line? Is that a wink-wink to any adult readers, hinting at some sort of lesbian relationship between Nancy and her friend? Is the ghost writer of this series a man, by any chance? I’m seeing a flamboyant gay queen, myself, who fancies he identifies with adolescent girls.

*

Next, The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot.

This time I give excerpts, all from the first few pages:

Page 1 I’m practically the biggest freak in the entire school. I mean let’s face it: I’m five foot nine, flat-chested and a freshman. How much more of a freak could I be?

P3 The truth is, when he’s away from Lana and all his jock friends, Josh is a totally different person. The kind of person who doesn’t care if a girl is flat-chested or wears size eight shoes.

[Here we have the first mention of our protagonist’s major insecurities. Ok. Fine. I accept that this is to help ordinary teenage girls identify with Mia. After all, every girl has to have something physically wrong with her. It’s a Western Beauty rule.]

P4 [on a to-do list] Number ten: measure chest

P5 …then Lana Weinberger made that sound she always makes and leaned over to me so that all her blonde hair swished onto my desk. I got hit by this giant wave of perfume and then Lana hissed in this really mean voice… I don’t understand what Josh Richter sees in her. I mean yeah, she’s pretty. But she’s so mean. Doesn’t she notice?

[Here we go, is this the set-up of the classic beautiful but nasty character? Please, please tell me it’s not. Because beautiful girls who KNOW they’re beautiful have to be nasty, right? That’s another rule about Beautiful girls in YA chick lit. If they're too Beautiful -- and know it -- then they are mean.]

Still on p5: Today I noticed that Mr Gianini’s nostrils stick out. A LOT. Why would you want to go out with a guy whose nostrils stick out so much?

[Of course, when girls are encouraged to spend so much time obsessing over their own looks, they’re not going to turn off their criticism when judging other people, including their teachers and mothers’ boyfriends.]

Okay, I haven’t read on. I find this a little painful, to be honest but to give this hugely popular series the benefit of the doubt, I assume some sort of character arc takes place throughout this novel, and that by the end of it, the Princess is feeling far more secure about her own looks. So I skip to the next book in the series and open it up.

Here’s what I find:

THE PRINCESS DIARIES TAKE TWO

P1 [The very first paragraph includes a beauty judgment:] OK. So I was just in the kitchen, eating cereal – you know, the usual Monday morning routine – when my mom comes out of the bathroom with this funny look on her face. I mean she was all pale and her hair was sticking out and she had on her terry cloth robe instead of her kimono which usually means she’s premenstrual.

So I was all, ‘Mom, you want some aspirin? Because no offence but you look like you could use some.’

[While I have had a bit to do with teenage girls and recognise the sarcastic voice, I am tiring of it a little. In general. Hell, no wonder our girls are so proficient at it! It's already a bad idea, the way our society is set up, to stick a whole lot of teenagers of the same age together in a year group and have them spend all day in each other's company, making each other more homogeneous. It is surely a truism that when you're surrounded by a certain culture all day, you tend to absorb the ideas purported by that culture. When adolescent girls are constantly bombarded with Beauty talk, is it any wonder that neurosis over their looks is taken as a universal given during the teenage years? It is not for YA authors to write didactic sap and get preachy. Yet I wonder, where exactly does author responsibility begin and end? I'm talking here about the responsibility to send affirming messages, rather than simply milking the widespread insecurities of readers, as a cheap -- and very effective -- means of creating instant reader identification.]

P2: [Another list, this time of her biggest problems:] I am the tallest girl in the freshman class. I am also the least endowed in the chest area. (Number seven is: I don’t have a boyfriend.)

[I’m sorry, but in the scheme of things these are not big problems. While I can see, from my adult perspective, the white middle-class irony of this, I’m not altogether convinced it’s HELPFUL, including such things in a list of massive problems. On the other hand, Beauty is so important in our culture (Western culture, and every country affected by the West) that for girls with small breasts, indeed, this insecurity is felt keenly.]

P4: I can’t help staring at Mr G and wondering what my new baby brother or sister is going to look like. My mom is totally hot, like Carmen Sandiego, only without the trenchcoat – further proof that I am a biological anomaly, since I inherited neither my mother’s thick curly black hair nor her C-cup. So there’s nothing to worry about there.

[Still rambling on about looks. Have you noticed we’re still on page four? This book has wide margins, by the way, and the sheer amount of space spent on criticising looks – both her own and those of others – is worrisome. And typical of YA fiction aimed solely at girls.]

But Mr G, I just don’t know. Not that Mr G isn’t good looking. I guess. I mean, he’s tall and has all his hair (score one for Mr G, since my dad’s bald as a parking meter). But what is with his nostrils? I totally can’t figure it out. They are just so… big.

I sincerely hope the kid gets my mom’s nostrils and Mr G’s ability to divide fractions in his head.’

[Finally, the scrutiny of looks comes to a temporary end. Next chapter.]

P7 [Description of self.] Sex: Haven’t had it yet. Ha ha, just kidding Mrs Spears! Ostensibly female but lack of breast size lends disturbing androgeny. Description: Five foot nine. Short mouse brown hair. (new blonde highlights) grey eyes, size eight shoe.

[‘ostensibly female’… There is nothing in here to reassure any small-breasted girl reading this book that actually, owning small mammaries does not make her any less of a woman. Can someone who has read this entire series kindly let me know if there is EVER any clarification of this point? I believe the male equivalent is worrying about penis size? Yet I don’t see endless rambling in YA fiction about that sort of insecurity. Boys, unlike girls, are not having it shoved in their faces when they pick up a popular YA novel. For boys, novels -- as opposed to the screen -- are one welcome respite from the world where Beauty is all. What about our girls?]

So should I read on? Princess Mia is hardly an example of a strong female character, though I have heard her described as such. She is positively neurotic about two things – her lack of breasts and her height. At what point should this character stop reflecting the real-life neuroses of teenage girls, because all this emphasis on looks is actually INFLUENCING the young female audience? I remember this time in my life. I know how obsessed girls get over their looks, and how scathing they can be of other people’s.

If this is what they’re reading, then no wonder.

Next, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

by Ann Brashares

(How much did Levis pay for that product placement?)

The first chapter consists entirely of a group of teenage girls trying on jeans, obsessing about the size of their backsides and being magically transformed by a pair of pants.

Here are some excerpts:

Carmen glanced at the structured canvas bag splayed wantonly in the middle of her bed. Suddenly she wished she had all-new underwear. Her best satin pair was sprouting tiny ropes of elastic from the waistband.

[How terrible for her.]

“Don’t you think you should try [the jeans] on?” Lena asked practically. “If they fit Carmen, they aren’t going to fit you.”

Carmen and Tibby both glared at Lena, not sure who should take more offence.

[Does this sort of interaction in books reflect real life cattiness, or does it encourage it? I think it's a matter of balance, and I believe the balance in this particular YA fiction goes too far. Do teenage girls themselves not tire of this constant bitchiness in books?]

Tibby had narrow hips and long legs for her small frame. The pants fell below her waist, hugging her hips intimately. They revealed a white strip of flat stomach, a nice inny belly button.

[We get a run-down of the 'physical highlights' of each character in this first chapter, in the same way pay-TV makeover programs such as What Not To Wear' go out of their way to highlight 'positive' features and 'minimise' negative ones. The message here is that 'All bodies are beautiful.' But what's the other message? That the cut of the jeans performs some sort of magic trick, all in aid of making the girls look more like that one Western Beauty Standard. Can anyone else not see the irony in this message? Note how the phrase 'a nice inny belly button' is not simply a reflection of this character's attributes - the author may as well say 'inny belly buttons are more beautiful than outty ones', thereby influencing the Beauty ethos in Western culture. Why not just stay out of it?]

I wonder if the lives of these characters are going to change because the pants make them look better. Nothing can make me read on.

Then I picked up Knocked Out By My Nunga-Nungas, where we’re on to page two before the first application of mascara and dissing of an ‘unattractive’ (lesbian) PE teacher.

Etcetera, etcetera.

*

Then there’s Twilight.

I can hardly talk about influential YA heroines without a passing mention of Isabella Swan.

These days it’s hardly worth making a distinction between a ‘character as portrayed in a popular novel’ and the ‘actress who plays her on the screen’. However, I won’t make any comments about Kristin Stewart, apart from to say that she is obviously inoffensive to the eye.

In the books, Stephanie Meyer goes out of her way to stress that Bella does not consider herself attractive. Of course she doesn’t. There’s no better way to create reader identification with teenage girls than by creating a main character who is insecure about her looks. Girls are cultured into finding something wrong with our bodies. It’s a rule. The more closely a girl fits society’s image of Beauty, the more effort she must go to in order to deny it. Say it often enough, and beautiful girls — in real life, as well as in Twilight – actually don’t see the Beauty that they do have.

This is a great shame.

Is it possible for a YA heroine to be at least ambivalent about her own appearance, by not really mentioning it at all?

Is it possible to write a YA heroine in which other characters respond to her brains, her wit, kindness or cunning, in the same way that other characters respond to Harry Potter; to the boy characters portrayed in Paul Jennings, Andy Griffiths and Morris Gleitzman’s books, and any number of mystery/detective novels aimed at YA boys, in which little to no mention is made of their looks?

*

Then we’ve got another subcategory of YA novels which do, indeed, follow the lives of teens who are not even close to the Western model of Beauty. In this case, the hero(ine) is not a beautiful character, but there’s hardly any question why: The theme requires it.

I’m talking about:

• Cookie by Jacqueline Wilson, in which the heroine is overweight. The main story is about how how Cookie and her mother might escape her father, but weight is hardly a non-issue, as it might be in an ideal world where YA Beauty were less important.
• The DUFF by Kody Keplinger (in which DUFF stands for ‘Designated Ugly Fat Friend’)
• Uglies by Scott Westerfield
• Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan, discussed very intelligently (as ever) on Radio New Zealand by the wonderful Kate de Goldi.

I would love my daughter to be reading books in which Beauty is a non-issue, but unless there is a shift in YA publishing  in the next ten years, I’ll be steering her towards books such as above.

I have met parents who would have been happy if their daughters were reading anything at all, including Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. I’ve met girls who read nothing but this kind of thing, and novelised versions of it, and I do think YA literature is influential in forming girls’ self-image, along with the combined influence of peers, parents, teachers, advertisements, TV series, movies, magazines and everything else that makes up this thing called Culture.

I do think adults need to look carefully at the books being marketed to the YA girls in our lives. It would be easy to gift an All New Nancy Drew and assume a strong, if old-fashioned, role model.

I don’t think that YA proto-chick-lit is quite the same as chick-lit aimed at 20-something women. Grown women are able to see the spoofy nature of female insecurities in a way that adolescent girls cannot. I’m not having a go at chick lit here. There are plenty of others who’ll do that.

It’s not just proto-chicklit fiction which does this, anyway. Take a horror story – sort of Twilight, but from when I was at school:

She had bought a new bathing suit for the party. To compete with Clair, however, she should have purchased breast implants.

[This may be thought in jest, but unfortunately it goes unchallenged.]

She couldn’t wait to see the rest of that hard body. She was already investigating types of contraceptives…But there was still that big question – when Bill asked her out. When was that going to be?

[This girl is one of the 'tough' characters in the story, who's not afraid to snub her nose at authority. She knows she wants sex, and will even organise contraception, but she still has to wait for the boy to ask her out.]

- Christopher Pike, The Party (1988)

Girls are particularly vulnerable to the idea that Beauty is All, which is pedalled, sometimes overtly, more often covertly, in much of the literature milking their dollar, in the same way those Dolly magazines milk them, exploiting their insecurities, stroking their egos with one hand and slapping them down with the other.

Related Links:

Talking about how fat we all are contributes to eating disorders.

Here in Australia, eating disorders are at an all time high. 2 % of the population will have an eating disorder at some point. 90% are women. Also in Canada, apparently. Even in India, among upper-class girls.

2 to 5 percent of college students are Bulimic. The ratio of females to males is 10:1.

The “Alternative” Female Actress, and why Hollywood has so few of them.

Do Parents Teach Girls To Worry?

Surprise, surprise, Women Have Fewer Speaking Roles But Show More Skin In Movies

Anxiety Gender Gap: Girls don’t start out more anxious than boys but they usually end up that way.

Sexism In Publishing: It’s about more than just numbers.

Glamour vs Greatness – two books compared, one for boys, one for girls.

A Thirty-year-old Woman Is Not A ‘Girl’

photo by Malingering

When you get to thirty you’ve reached an age where you’re no longer the youngest in the room on any given occasion, and the professionals you consult are possibly now younger than yourself. My doctor and dentist aren’t much older than I am. I’m pretty sure the local vet is younger than me, and yesterday when I referred to the local speech and language therapist I referred to her as ‘the girl’.

I quickly took it back.

As I coast closer and closer towards middle age (and some would argue I’m already there, considering the global average longevity is still only 60 years of age) I’m determined not to become one of those people who refers to every woman younger than herself as ‘a girl’.

I find this intolerably condescending. Yet yesterday I accidentally came out with it, despite being fully aware of feminist issues.

This is a feminist issue rather than an age issue because you far less frequently hear men referred to as ‘boys’. I suspect short men get it more often than tall men of the same age, and less powerful men such as cycle couriers probably get ‘boy’ more often than they would like, and you do hear the phrase ‘little man’ used condescendingly in sentences such as, ‘I have a little man come round and do my windows for me’, but in this part of the world, it is very common for women — any woman, of any stature and profession — to be referred to as girls for our entire lives.

Of course, at a certain point it turns into ‘old girl’. This depends on how the speaker guesses at her menopausal status, I suspect.

My own father is the world’s worst perpetrator, and at the age of 68, he calls any woman younger than himself a ‘girl’, even if she is in her fifties. He doesn’t see this as a problem, because he considers only his own intent; he only calls women ‘girls’ if he feels no antagonism towards them. He’s got another set of words for the other type, which don’t need repeating here.

Perhaps he shies away from ‘woman’ because ‘woman’ is an altogether more distancing term, weighted in a way that doesn’t seem to apply to the word ‘man’, which is about as neutral a word as you can get. Bill Clinton made use of this loading when he referred to Monica Lewinsky as ‘that woman’. (The demonstrative didn’t help.)

But if my father believes he is paying a mature woman a compliment when he refers to her dismissively as a ‘girl’, he is only fooling himself. He’s been pulled up several times (that I know about) for doubting the professionalism or competence of a professional woman simply because of her sex and the way she looks. One notable time is when he visited the dentist — a woman of about 30, petite and blonde — and queried her diagnosis. “Are you sure?” he said, disbelieving whatever it was he had wrong with his teeth. She responded with a terse, “I know I look young but I’m a fully qualified dentist. I’m not a dental ‘nurse’, if that’s what you might be thinking.”

We need more women like this, who recognise condescension when they see it. Because I know my own father well enough to realise that he does, indeed, query the expertise of a young, sexually attractive woman far more readily than he would query a man of similar age and attractiveness. It’s no coincidence then, that he’ll readily refer to such women as ‘girls’.

Women, too, can fall into the trap of taking the moniker of ‘girl’ applied to themselves as a compliment. The trouble is, this only comes as a compliment after a woman can no longer truly pass as youthful. And it’s really no compliment at all, because being young means being naive, innocent, inexperienced, gullible, and sure, it also means being energetic and wrinkle-free and lithesome and nubile, but how much good is that when

1. It’s not even true and

2. Such attributes are of no practical use when women are moving into managerial, experienced roles in their workplace, or taking leadership roles in their communities, precisely when age and wisdom should be treasured, not hidden, nor disguised by inaccurate terminology.

A friend in her thirties recently rejoined the workforce after staying home for a few years in order to raise her children. She works with Australian farmers, and no longer felt that the words ‘Good girl’ applied to her. Yet she continues to hear that very phrase.

It’s true enough that when old men call mature women ‘girls’ they mean no harm, but ‘intention’ is not the point here.

I’d like to see women embrace the word ‘woman’, without taking ownership of its slightly negative, distancing, overripe connotations. I’d like to see the word ‘girl’ avoided in situations where ‘boy’ would not be applied to a man. Would a thirty year old man ever hear the phrase ‘Good boy’? Or does that sound like a farmer addressing his dog? (And I care not one jot about how precious farmers consider their farm dogs. Don’t give me that.)

I’d like to see women take ownership of their age and wear it with pride, without falling prey to flattery when addressed mistakenly as a younger person. When a woman is called a ‘girl’ this is symbolic of a deeper condescension which is widespread in our community, and this needs to be challenged, if only this means resolving not to make use of it ourselves.

Very Interesting Related Link: Marie Hardin talks about women and sports, and one of her ideas is that sports fans are comfortable with ‘girls’ playing sports, but far less comfortable with the idea of ‘women’ playing sport.

I recommend: The Opposite of “Man” is “Boy”, not “Woman”.

Did you catch the #dontcallmebabe hashtag conversation? If not, here’s a roundup from Jezebel.

Computers and Etiquette

… and Tiny shouts back, “I GOT DUMPED BY STATUS UPDATE,” and I answer, “YEAH, I NOTICED. I MEAN, HE COULD HAVE AT LEAST TEXTED. OR E-MAILED. OR SENT A PASSENGER PIGEON.”

- Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

Most etiquette questions for the digital age can be answered well enough if we only apply real-world common sense.

Still, there are a few things I’m yet to work out.

1. WHERE DOES AN EMAIL CONVERSATION END?

A former colleague was having a moan about the size of her inbox. “Why do people always have to send a THANK-YOU?” she said. “If I sent you what you wanted, I consider the deal done. You don’t need to fill up my inbox with a stupid one-liner email which says nothing more enlightening than ‘Thank you for your email.’ Waste of time, that.”

My own inbox has never been unmanageably large, so I couldn’t identify with that.

I’ve always been the sort to send a ‘confirmation email’.

I wonder if it’s an older woman thing. My co-worker was like my mother and mother-in-law in that respect – each of these 50-something women considers an email conversation finished about one message before I would.

I’ve decided not to send what I shall loosely call ‘confirmation emails’ to people older than 50, but I still send them to younger people. Bear in mind this research is based on a sample size of um… three, so I wouldn’t use it as a guide for life.

2. READING RECEIPTS

At the same workplace, my immediate boss sat five metres away from my desk, but through a door.

Instead of walking those five metres to talk to me about something, she sent an email. Turns out there’s this function in Outlook which allows an imperative sort of person to require recipients send a ‘reading receipt’.

I find this one of the most obnoxious instances of workplace hierarchy that I’ve come across. So I never did send a receipt. I wondered if my boss would get off her backside and walk the five metres to my desk to ask me why I hadn’t send the reading receipt, but she never did. She just stopped asking for receipts after a while.

I can understand why even workmates who sit together might prefer to send emails rather than interrupt each other’s workflow, but I can’t see a single occasion where a reading receipt would be necessary except, perhaps, if you’re working on REALLY IMPORTANT LIFE AND DEATH stuff, with deadlines. (I wasn’t working to deadline.)

Thing is, a receipt doesn’t prove a person has read an email. A receipt means they’ve sent the receipt. Big difference.

And with me there’s this perverse inverse psychology thing that goes on. The evil goblin inside wants to send the reading receipt WITHOUT EVEN GLANCING at its contents… just because I can.

3. paw PRINTS

I’m not the world’s most tidy critter, but I’m fussy about my fussy things, and one of those is fingerprints on the computer screen.

If someone comes over to my desk and wants to point something out, it’s amazing how often that somebody will wipe their greasy mitts all across the screen.

You have to have a good working relationship with someone before you can tell them to fek orf.

Better, perhaps: Keep a packet of screen wipes next to the monitor, and whip one out whenever the perpetrator approaches your desk. Avoid all eye contact during conversation. Keep your eyes instead on their index finger, and dash in for a wipe the instant your screen is sullied.

Related Links: Manners for the Digital Age Podcast; Etiquette and Social Media, Seth Godin’s Email Checklist, Email Etiquette.

On “Stray” Cats

pic by Difusa

The cat was waiting on the steps. He looked around, wondering whose cat it was. He let it inside all the same, since the cat was at least some sort of company.

- Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

That’s what you don’t do with other people’s cats.

I once had a cat who went walkabout. While he was still ‘under my care’ (while I was still paying for his expensive, vet-sourced, balanced and nutritious food, that is) he used to make regular trips to a middle-aged cat-loving woman two streets over. I’d written my phone number clearly on his collar, so I got a call one day to let me know he was there.

When I arrived to pick him up, I saw my own cat ensconced in the arms of another woman. She spoke to him in loving tones, and I took him — reluctantly, on his part — back to my place.

But Fleabus didn’t want to stay at my place, even though I’d paid for his vaccinations and neutering and everything else. No, cats don’t thank you for any of that. (Strangely.)  It wasn’t for lack of love or attention, but Fleabus decided he was better off with the lonely woman two streets over.

Maybe she stroked him in just the right spot. Maybe she let him sleep in her bed. Or maybe it was because I was at work all day, and she was not.

It doesn’t matter. Because she started feeding him.

I continued to see Fleabus around the neighbourhood, perfectly well fed and in great condition. He had a distinctive white moustache, so I knew he was Fleabus, all right.

Woman stole my cat.

If a cat turns up on your doorstep, or beside your fishpond (in this case), don’t feed it for chrissake. Don’t offer love and affection. Don’t speak to it in that high-pitched voice normally reserved for idiots and small children… unless you WANT it to come back.

I live in a different country these days. Fleabus will be getting on in years, and before long his health will be failing him. With any luck, his new ‘owner’ considers financial responsibility all hers, so when he gets a nasty infection, or needs medication for age-related conditions, she’ll be willing to pay the vet’s bill.

What happens all too often, however, is these new cat owners have vastly underestimated the financial cost of looking after a pet, and when the bills run to more than just food (which they feel is already a ‘community service’) they balk at the vet’s fee and dump the cat at the RSPCA.

“It’s not my cat,” they’ll say. “It’s a stray.”

And if you were to say this, you would be told, “If you’ve been feeding it, this is your cat.”

Don’t go nicking other people’s pets. If it’s sleek and well-fed and hasn’t got the mange, it’s getting fed all right. Don’t you worry about that.

PS I now own a dog.

How Did Sport Get So Big?

pic by philerooski

Him: What’s the news on Japan?

Me: Dunno. The news ended at seven thirty. I just missed it.

Him: You should put it on the news channel.

Me: I was on the news channel. It’s seven thirty, it’s a Saturday morning, so Australians must have sport. Sport is not news. I don’t know why sports has to be on the news channel. Sport is ‘entertainment’. Why can’t they have their own channel? It’s not news. Blah blah blah. Putting sports on and calling it ‘news’ is about as ridiculous as putting book reviews on the news channels. They should do that, actually. Why isn’t book news on the news?

Him: (sleepily) You should start a lobby group.

For intelligent reading on this subject: How Did Sport Get So Big? and an interview with its author, Tim De Lisle on RNZ.

Also: Why Australians Are Obsessed With Sport.