Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

There seems to have been some kind of Internet memo I missed (thank god; I have after all been trying to spend less time in front of the computer, especially after realizing how much more time I had that week I deleted all my Google Reader feeds... of course some of them are back now, but a) not as many and b) I’m more cavalier about ignoring some stuff that turns up there).

Anyway, it seems in the last couple of days my little corner of the internet has been trying to send me a message, and that message is that this decade just finishing is going to be called The Noughties.

I do not approve.

i first saw it in, oddly enough, my Google Reader because Andrew shares things from a blog called The Noughties Were Shit, which is the usage of this word I am most likely to forgive because a) it talks about the decade in the past tense already, which I find inexplicably comforting and endearing and b) as the title suggests, it’s cynical and vitriolic about pretty much everything under discussion. (I do rather wish this included the flaccid nomenclature as well, which is delightfully meta -- calling the noughties the noughties is shit! -- but find no mention of this).

And that was fine, because it was a one-off thing. But later that same day I saw it somewhere else on another blog, and then on a horrible MTV recap-of-the-decade type show (don’t look at me, I didn’t have the remote... I don’t even have the TV). The latter especially strengthened my suspicions that, as the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close*, the weight of commercialized tackiness will force people into creating not just the usual year-end retrospectives but bigger decade-end retrospectives.

I’m sure we just did this, but 1999 is longer ago than I thought and the world has moved on to bigger and better problems. Like, while those retrospectives were clearly Of The 90s, we’re not sure what it is we’re talking about here.

And admittedly after a short burst of ridiculous suggestions about this time ten years ago (the Aughties? the Naughties? the Zeros?), it seems everybody gave up on this because we had better things to worry about. Then Dubya stole his first election and this sort of thing quickly paled in comparison.

But now he’s gone, finally, and there are music videos to be ranked, people. And films and music and comics and and and... The potential for commercial exploitation is the only thing that seems sufficient to spurn anyone on to choosing an epithet for this quickly-ending decade, I get that. I do just wish they’d chosen something better than the Noughties, you know?

In my more grumpy moods, I prefer Nowties. (Nowt being, for those who don’t know, northern-English for “nothing.”)

And hereby I conclude my application for Youngest Curmudgeon Ever. I know I’m only 27 (but only for a couple more weeks!) but...

...I can’t help seeing this as the decade where I learned of the joys of ethernet and the internet started to steal my soul. Where I began to feel out of place for first not having a mobile phone, and since I got one in 2004 for not having one that gives me directions, orders my takeaways, lets me play games, takes pictures, plays music, and pretty much ensures (with Morrissettean irony) that I never have to interact with another human being ever again). This is the decade nostalgia reinvented itself as the toys from my childhood started making a comeback and I realized with horror that this is because people my age are now having kids. Though why that means they’d want to buy them Strawberry Shortcake dolls I don’t know, but then maybe I’m biased; I was always much more Lego than Strawberry Shortcake. This is the decade of fanfic and “reality shows” and voting people on or off the TV, the notion that people should get to participate in all their entertainment somehow dumbing us all down rather than lifting us up above the level of indolently passive consumption as it sounds like it might have. It’s the decade of blogs and vlogs and moblogs and comments, endless comments. Post anything on the internet and there’ll be someone along in a minute to tell you it’s all the fault of Muslim extremists or to try to sell you something to enlarge your penis. It’s the decade of spam, of information being if not free then extremely cheap and extremely widespread, edging towards both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer. And thus we find that talk is cheap and maybe that you get what you pay for, too. Bruce Springsteen’s song with the chorus that goes “Fifty-seven channels and nothing on” must sound positively quaint by now; now we’ve got hundreds of channels and nothing on. That’s progress. A bunch of them are in HD now and everything. I can’t blame Charlie Brooker for wanting to go on a culture diet. Why do you think I have no TV? And of course that only means that no I haven’t seen Lost or Life on Mars or Heroes or Firefly or The Wire or Dollhouse or whatever the hell it is I’m supposed to be watching now. And you know what? I don’t mind. Of course I don’t mind people who do care about those things either (the only reason I can rattle off these names is that I’ve heard about them from people I care about), but goddam it, I’ve had enough.



* Unless you are a pedant like me, one of those annoying bastards seething as everyone else welcomed the dawn of the new millennium around the time they were worrying about the Y2K bug because we knew the new millennium wouldn’t start until the next year... and that Y2K didn’t sound like anything to worry about. And hey, we were right about Y2K too, weren’t we? Well then.

I bought a black tank top in Target once. I wore it for pajamas at first, but it eventually ended up in a garbage can in the ladies’ toilets of a nice Italian restaurant just off Oxford Street in London.

A few weeks ago I saw a guy whose job led him lug some new furniture to a hospital ward in Manchester taking a break with a cup of tea he was drinking out of a mug advertising a brand of livestock feed headquartered in Iowa. He probably ddin’t notice -- people often don’t notice these things -- but I did, if only because it was me who brought that cup and a few others there, where I work, because we’re always short of coffee mugs.

My mom had given me a few old castoffs from her kitchen cupboard when I was home for Christmas. The livestock feed mugs were among the unloved and unmissed because it’s been years since my dad had that job, a travelling salesman for this feed company. The job too was unloved and unmissed; my dad’s shy even by taciturn Midwestern farmers’ standards and he did not suit this kind of work, though he did whatever work was going in the two years or so after he found himself part of a surprise round of layoffs at the job he’d done twenty years and before he could settle down into a proper job that would pay enough to support his wife and little kids.

The coffee mugs will have probably stayed in the regular rotation for a while before being consigned to this life languishing in a dark cupboard until my mom hit upon the plan of fobbing them off on me, so they wouldn’t be taking up space any more.

The tank top has a little story like that too, leading up to its unusual demise that has stuck with me even though it’s been a couple of years since its strap broke and I pulled it out from under the other shirt I’d been wearing over it and wore on its own the rest of that day. It has its secret life, as indeed do all the other objects in these stories: the couches that guy helped carry in to the ward where I work, before he had his tea: as far as I’m concerned they began life with excited talk of ordering them from a catalog, the ward manager excited about improving the ward environment beyond the capabilities of the old stained uncomfortable couches. But if you asked someone who worked in a furniture factory or drove a moving van, you’d get quite a different story about identical objects.

Packing stuff up for the move gave me a million little encounters with the secret life of objects. There’s the silky nightgown and robe I was given as a bridal shower present, eliciting mock-scandalized exclamations from my mom and her friends and elderly great-aunts as it was by far the most salacious gift I was given as the competition was things like a recipe book, a photo album and for some reason lots of potholders. But Andrew’s very sensitive to the feel of certain fabrics and he can’t even bear to hear the folds of this sort of thing swish together as I move, so I could never wear it around him. And as was the way in the old flat the front of the drawer it was in completely fell off and so it joined the piles of things on the bedroom floor; sometimes I’d fling it aside as I was looking for something else, but I almost always felt a bit sad to see it there, meant to be fun and nice but proving so useless. Oh well; it was bought by someone who’d clearly asked my mom what size I was because it was two sizes too big anyway. It seemed a shame to throw it away but even though it’s only sexy by old-lady standards it did seem quite an intimate thing and not the sort of thing to be given to charity shops even if it hasn’t really been worn. I think it was thrown away or just left behind when we moved; I’ve not seen it since anyway.

And so many things like that: a locket given to me by a now-ex girlfriend, which I hated to see again. There’s a message inside it, which I didn’t have to open to read becasue I remember it exactly, and i wonder if she believed it even when she had it engraved there or if it was always just part of the game we were playing. I honestly don’t remember what I did with that; again it seems unbearable to throw away anything so personal but yet what would I do with it now? The message was well-intentioned but quickly proved wrong so it makes me sad to think of it, much less wear it. But it makes me sad to think of throwing it away too.

Perhaps I am silly to bestow such importance, such weight, on things that are, well, just things aren’t they? Sometimes I long for a spartan existence in a minimalist house. But never for more than a few seconds at a time. I love loving objects; as with any love there is the price to pay for my attachment but it’s one I’ll happily pay to live in a world where toasters can be brave and the can o’ beans knows a lot more than it’s letting on.

brave_mercutio kindly pointed out last night that my coat has an easy-access tail hole.

I had never thought of this before. I knew it has one of those tiny little pleats or vents or whatever they're called, and I knew it's sewn together, thus rendering it completely useless. But I had never thought that this would make it much easier if I had a tail.

"No unslightly tail bulge," Pixie pointed out.

There's always something to smile about.

I think it says a lot about my upbringing that even now, when I smell skunkweed, I still think skunk? a good five seconds before I think ah, weed!

That's down from about thirty minutes the first time this happened, several months ago. I've had lots of practice since then.

Maybe it's because I got my mp3 player working again so I can listen to the still-new-to-me Hold Steady album Boys and Girls in America that made me think about Minneapolis even though this album seems less about that than the previous two were.

But I think it's the sunshine that left me feeling Minnesota as I stood there waiting for a bus to work on Wednesday afternoon. I just wanted to sit outside with a cold root beer or maybe some iced tea and listen to the Twins play.

For, as I then tried to rationalize, the sunshine seems more familiar than anything else. It travels better. There certainly aren't the blizzards here that I'm used to in the winter. There's rain in both places of course, but it feels different: at home you can see the black clouds rolling across the fields off to the west and think about what this will do to the crops, the land.

Here, it rains so hard it bounces off the sidewalk and soaks my ankles no matter how good my umbrella is, or it just drizzles in a way that permeates everything and leaves me feeling damp even when I am inside. Just misery with no context or benefit that I can see; it's arbitrarily judgmental like some old cranky beardy desert god.

Sunny days, I decided, are the same everywhere. Rainy days are each rainy in their own way.

The motorway makes me feel at home. I'd give it about .79 of a Trafford Centre (1 Trafford Centre being the apex of Americanness, as it is the most American thing I have seen since I got here).

It would have an even higher score if it didn't offer a mere mirror image of the traffic I'm used to. As a permanent passenger in motor vehicles, I'm not concerned about which side the steering wheel is on (though it does make sitting in the front passenger seat now quite a thrill ride, as I'd never had that perspective in a car before); my only problem is that the rest of the cars are on the wrong side of the one I'm in.

Which I didn't even notice for several minutes on Friday night, speeding down to London in the dark, because I was contendedly watching the reflection of the traffic, rendered pretty convincingly in the big windows on the coach, out the left side where, my brain is quietly convinced, the traffic should be. Eventualy I realized I wasn't looking at the real thing but decided that's no reason to stop watching through the looking glass. The reality was not so strangely comforting as this familiar sight.

The first big panel of side-window stopped just before my seat, and that stops the reflection from the windshield too. So the stream of headlights vanished just as they approached me, like something in a dream that dissolves if you try to touch it or just look too closely.

I wonder if the appeal of high heels isn't all about the clicky noise.

At least, if I were going to find them appealing, that would be why. I think about this a lot of the times when I wear my boots, as I did today, because that is the only time I make those noises.* While even I think my legs actually look good in them (How can that be? I wondered today, watching my reflection in the sheet-glass of a passing building. Before I could come up with any answers, though, I was moving swiftly along to thoughts like Oh, a hole in the sidewalk, best be swerving to the left then. Damn lack of peripheral vision! It takes all my fun away.) the look doesn't interest me nearly as much as the sound.

Maybe it's that I have poor eyes and good ears, or maybe it's just that I have no idea how to be attracted to women. But, this is how it is in my world.

I was so jealous of my mom on Sundays, when I was growing up. I had no such shoes then; I don't even think it occured to me to ask for them. I had nothing other than flats until I was in my late teens, but to be fair that's not just because my mom was strict about grown-up things: I rebelled by being sensible.

But oh yes, the coveted click-click, accentuating every step, making me feel purposeful even though I'm not, making other people seem authoritative even when they're not. The cacophony of shoe-clicks in my morning commute can be a wonder to behold. Even (or especially) singly, the clicky sound never fails to grab at least a little of my attention.

* I guess I appreciated it all the more today when I spent some time stuck behind this girl who was wearing huge angular stilettos. She wasn't really picking her feet up off the ground — not that I blame her: it can't have been easy to stand, much less move, in those things. But with the heels dragging on the sidewalk, there was no beautiful sassy click I'd come to appreciate without really noticing it, but instead a scccccraaape! that was starting to make me feel the way soe people look when they hear fingernails on a chalkboard. I could've throttled her (Tuesday's a bit early in the week for homicidal thoughts, but it's been a rough week ... or, month, or year or something). It didn't help that she was as severe and angular as her shoes, looking like she weighed about half as much as me and thus I probably could've strangled her, or at least carried her around by her hair or maybe her angular, well-tailored jacket or something so her feet wouldn't be touching the ground anyway.

One of the first things I remember about being in Manchester was eating KFC with Andrew in Piccadilly station. When we were done I looked around for somewhere to put our plastic wrappers and Andrew told me I wouldn't find one. I frowned slightly but didn't ask, so it was a while before I learned that the idea is that the IRA can't put bombs in trash bins if they aren't there.

England was so similar to what I was used to that the tiniest things could — and sometimes still do — disarm me, because I'm not expecting anything strange at all. (Not consciously anyway. But I think somewhere in the background, some bit of me is always aware of it. I don't usually notice it, like you don't usually notice that you can see your nose, but it's there. When I'm feeling small or lonely or just ... adrift, a little of that really is because I know the brands of peanut butter are different and because I have nothing to say in a conversation about having to play cricket and rugby at school.)

Maybe I just like Piccadilly for being one of the first things I rmeember, for being both comfortingly familiar — the KFC, after all, and the general capitalist haven there on the concourse — and excitingly strange. Because there are trains! I love trains. I love public transport in general, the smelly buses that always leave just as you're getting to the bus stop and the Metrolink machines that take my money yet give me no ticket. For someone who can't drive and grew up somewhere that youi have to drive, even British public transport is evidence of divine benevolence. And while being the worst of the lot, with their atrocious and inconsistent pricing, their endless ability to make each of their many sins Someone Else's Fault now that they're privatized, trains are also the best.

The other big station in Manchester makes me feel slightly ashamed for liking Piccadilly. Victoria hasn't been rebuit in glass and steel, so while it has its movie posters and vending machines and yellow-edged-for-your-safety stairs, it also still has a little character. As Wikipedia would tell you, "The present Edwardian building has a 160 yard facade, which still carries an iron and glass canopy bearing the names of the original destinations which it served, and a tile map depicting the routes of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway which operated from the station until 1923."

But I've spent a lot more time in Piccadilly; only once have I gotten a train from Victoria (and Andrew later said that couldn't have happened, but look! I have proof), so Victoria was just a place to get on or off the tram. But I've spent lots of time in Piccadilly; waiting for the relatively-infrequent trains to Chester so we could visit Andrew's parents, waiting for Andrew at lunchtime or after work when he worked near the station, waiting for irkthepurist and mrs_fhqwhgads, who were on a slower train than they'd anticipated, leaving me lots of time to scrutinize everyone I saw and wonder if I'd recognize them even if I did see them.

And in all that waiting, you hear a lot of train announcements. I get tired of "this is a security announcement" or "this is a platform alteration", but never of the litany of stops: Levenshulme, Heaton Chapel, Stockport, Cheadle Hulme, Handforth, Wilmslow, Alderly Edge, Chelford, Goostrey, Holmes Chapel, Sandbach (pronounced sand-batch of course), Crewe. Mauldeth Road, Burnage, East Didsbury, Gatley, Heald Green, Manchester Airport.

Today's reason I love the internet: auntysarah saying ... joining the tube at Tottenham Hale. That station has a special place in my heart, as the way the woman on the automated announcer thing at Cambridge says it is just so melodious. I think I may have a crush on her over it.

You know, I never thought of it before, and of course I know nothing about the tube, and I don't really get crushes on girls, but I think I know what she means.

At least, I've always liked the sound of Cleethorpes.

I've been buying the same kind of deodorant for years now.

I noticed this today for a reason I'll get to in a minute, but first I wanted to say that this realization was dismaying. Brand loyalty for such a thing? Yet another evil multinational I'm supporting (although, of course, in the nature of evil multinationals, they probably already own everything else I buy anyway)? Hmph.

But then I thought I do it to save myself having to think.

I mean, in your average drugstore or supermarket, there are vast swathes of the stuff. Spray-on, roll-on, sticks of white chalk that always announce No White Residue! but always leave white residue anyway, sticks of clear chalk that announce Goes on Clear!, sticks of clear gooey gel (which I tried once but didn't like because it was always cold and putting cold things in my armpits every morning isn't my idea of fun) ... they're all supposed to do the same thing, and the list of ingredients is pretty much the same, including the aluminum that'll give you Alzheimer's. Who needs such a multitude of choices, just to keep you and your loved ones safe from B.O., especially when the ingredients on the back of all of them are suspiciously similar?

The only difference seems to be that this, like so much else in our culture, is segregated by gender. The women's are all pastel and proudly display their delicate scents and how good they are for your skin. The men's, on the other side of the supermarket aisle, seem much more interesting (but this might be because I look at them even less than I look at women's deodorant which, we've already established, is very little because I always get the same kind): black plastic, big letters in italicized fonts that look as if they're going to zoom right off the label and slide on to the next ... what?

You know, there aren't good words to use on the subject of deodorant, have you ever noticed that? Even when the back label includes directions for use, it refers to product and container, which just doesn't sound right for colloquial speech. But I can't think of anything that colloquial speech uses instead; both the abstract ideal and the concrete reality are just deodorant. Sometimes the latter can be a deodorant, which grates on my nerves, though I'm not sure if that's justifiable.

Anyway, the men's deodorant is cool-looking -- in fact I think Cool is used as a fragrance name, because men's deodorant is like that. It has names like Active and Turbo, much more fun than Powder Fresh or Shower Clean that we women get stuck with. I used to dislike this naming convention: what does "cool" or "sport" smell like? That's total nonsense. But then, my shower doesn't smell Shower Clean -- if you mean the place, it, hopefully doesn't smell like much of anything, and if you mean the process, well, at the end of it I smell like whatever fragrances have been articifially added to my shampoo and soap -- perhaps, ultimately, from the same evil multinational that brings me my deodorant.

Men's deodorant is cool-looking and high-tech. The newfangled stuff will be found here, the clear gels seem more predominant than on the other side of the aisle. And the gel will ooze out of the top in a patented pattern of squiggles or something, specific to that brand.

But the thing I like most about men's deodorants is that some of them advertise themselves as being so good they'll keep working even if you skip a day. An alien sociologist of the future could learn a lot by examining deodorant.

If I may be allowed to generalize even half as much as those labels do, I must say that I don't for a second believe that men are going to stand there comparing the Active scent with the Turbo one next to it. These things exist because women buy things like deodorant for the men in their lives. Not always, of course, and not all men have a woman to do it anyway (but this generalization goes on to say that those men would just blindly grab something because nobody needs this multitude of choices just to keep themselves and their loved ones safe from B.O., especially when the ingredients on the back of all of them are suspiciously similar), but still I know there are women who care more about the scents of their men than the men themselves do; cologne is a devious gift (as well as a boring one).

Speaking of scents, here's all I wanted to say when I started this entry: since I habitually buy the same kind of deodorant, I now find myself in possession of a British ... container of product (which I bought last time I was here and left it) and a USian one (which I had at home and brought with me because I had long forgot that I already had one here ... though even if I had remembered I probably still would've brought that one with me, because what's the use of leaving it 4000 miles away from my armpits?).

Since I'm not bothered much about deodorant fragrance -- I am not irritated by them, in either an olfactory or epidermal sense, but I do sort of appreciate their being there and it'd be a bit more effort to look for the containers of unscented product -- I get the Original Scent. (A name even more meaningless than those that evoke showers or turbosity! What's so original about it, eh?)

And (this is my point, coming up now) I think they smell different.

I haven't admitted it until now -- hardly even to myself -- because it seems silly. Why would an evil multinational corporation devise two different scents to have the same name (and surely Original Scent is, as the default, an important scent), merely because they are sold on opposite sides of the Atlantic?

And yet, now that I think about it, I'm sure I can tell which days I've applied the British product and which days I reach for the USian container. When I got back here and smelled my long-lost deodorant again, it conjured up associations of all the lovely times I'd put on deodorant last summer, thinking of the day's adventures ahead, exciting things like riding buses. And I wouldn't think that if it was the same thing I'd been wearing in all the intervening days, would I? The human brain has an amazing sensitivity to smells, and they're strongly linked to memory. My faith in that sort of fact I've read in at least one book is the basis for my conviction that there are two Orignial Scents.

Call me crazy if you will; I don't mind.

I like the USian one better. It's a bit less harsh. Or at least I feel like I smell less chemically fake and more like me (without noxious armpits, of course) when I use that one.

I've noticed in recent days that the USian one has disappeared. I thought it fell down behind the chest of drawers, but I looked yesterday and didn't see it there. And the British one is almost gone. It's still got some useful stuff -- I mean, product -- left in it but you can see the turquoise plastic underneath the white chalk that is guaranteed not to leave white residue, so its days are numbered.

Maybe it's a sign. Soon, I'll have the chance to buy a different kind of deodorant. I've had enough of the original nonsense.

More than anything else, this is what convinces me I am in a different world. I never saw a single person jogging in Crumpsall, but in Didsbury I see them every second or third time I leave the house, always someone thinner than me (even the men, I think), wearing headphones and running around in shorts and t-shirts.

Seeing joggers always makes me happy; I invariably think Wow, I'm glad I'm not doing that.

I may envy their ubiquitous mp3 players, or the shapely legs on the female ones, but at least I go outside dressed warmly enough that I don't have to keep moving or die.

And, actually, I managed to find a pair of tall boots that I can get on (and if you think it's crazy to live the kind of life where the size of your calves matters to your footwear, I'd have to agree with you) which is quite a feat -- I failed on two previous attempts, but those were in the everyone's-a-size-4-right? USA -- so I'm feeling pretty good about my legs now as it is, thank you very much.