The Equality of the Day

My facebook friends are self-important assholes. It’s true. They are. Self-righteous and intolerant, they cloak themselves in the religion of liberalism, cafeteria style, and decry anyone who doesn’t think the same way. If I called them all out on it there I’d be fighting 24/7 to no point, so I don’t do it, but this latest batch of “unfriend me if you’re a bigoty bigot who doesn’t support gay marriage! Because bigotry!” has really stuck in my craw.

Firstly, I am not consciously “friends” with anyone who is anti-gay. So if you’re one of those idiot friend-aggregators who will befriend anyone you met for five minutes while stopped at a red light, then yeah, you’re going to end up sharing social media space with a lot of people who hold divergent opinions. One solution would be to just befriend people you’re actually, you know, friends with, and not befriend everyone and then self-righteously ban them from your presence for disagreeing with you.

Secondly, these people who are so onanistically congratulating themselves for supporting the gayz – well guess what, I have seen each and every one of you make bigoted, idiotic and shaming remarks and arguments about many other social groups. You are all intolerant of someone, but you mask your intolerance in jokes and “statistics” and bullshit rationalizations. Supporting gay marriage is the most popular and least-contentious cause du jour among people of our sort, so coming out in support of it yourself is bandwagonning at its most tiresome. Of course everyone has the right to get married, you fuckwits. Of course the people you are friends with would support that. What are you even talking about, you puffed-up, choir preaching assholes? Each of these self-righteouser than thou posts is just an excuse for the same people to beat their chests and proclaim how supportive they are of something that (in most cases) is purely theoretical for them. Whatever. STFU. You don’t get any cookies.

I have seen these same people support the denial of rights for other marginalized groups. I’ve heard the racist, sexist jokes they make. I’ve seen them mock people of different body types, of varying physical ability, condemn people who make lifestyle choices different to theirs. They are intolerant on many, many other issues, and then have the effrontery to condemn other people for their intolerance.

What a bunch of assholes.

If I honestly told people to never speak to me again unless they supported equally the rights of every single person on earth, I would not even have myself for company. We’re all bigots in our own ways. It’s not admirable, but we should at least recognize it, and not condemn others for what they do until we sort our own shit out. No, we shouldn’t tolerate people voting each other’s rights away, but for fuck’s sake, when you do speak about issues like this, have some fucking humility. Understand your place in the system which oppresses anyone not fitting the norm. Try to be a better person. And stop being so fucking self-righteous on facebook. Go do it on your blog like a regular person.

On alone and together

Today someone asked Neil Gaiman when he and his wife are going to start living together already. This was his reply:

I don’t know that we ever will. We have sort of living together plans when she gets off the road in 2013, but we LOVE being apart almost as much as we love being together.

The three months thing was much too long. (I think anything over three weeks apart is too long.) But I’m loving being home alone right now, and not having to pay attention to anyone except the dogs. I got home this evening, I fixed the house wifi, and walked the dogs, and phoned a few people, and did things on my own, and am really looking forward to sleeping alone for the first time in ten days. I can read as long as I want to, or even write in bed until I fall asleep, which I can’t do if someone is trying to sleep beside me…
And Amanda’s back in Boston tonight for the first time in four months, and am not even expecting to hear from her until around Tuesday. And then I’ll see her on Friday, and we’ll get about five days together.
I cherish the time apart, and I cherish the time together.

I suspect that when we do actually get somewhere for both of us to live, it will have two wings, or rooms, or be two places next door to each other, or across the street. With some places in common, and some places we can be alone.

(We have completely different theories of what should be in a kitchen, for a start.)

There aren’t any rules to this thing, other than what we make up, anyway. I married someone fiercely independent, except when she wants to not be alone, and am myself rather happy to be on my own, except when I’m not.

And I really loved that reply. Mostly I see people assuming that relationships mean cohabitation. Sometimes I see people agree that relationships can also mean living separate lives and having separate spaces, but rarely do I see people acknowledge (because they assume the separate spaces people have no hearts, I think, no softer feelings) that when we who don’t want to live with you want to BE with you, we want it badly, and we want it desperately and hard. And that’s another piece of relationships that has to be accounted for – I don’t want you around until I want you around SO SO SO MUCH. And it may seem selfish and it may seem wrong, even to your partner. It may not seem fair. But if you can find the person with whom it seems natural and understandable and fair, and you’re an adult and can deal with that kind of “I love you but please get out of my space for now.” then I think you are very lucky.

If finances and temperaments allow you to live separately, that’s already a fantastic thing, but if both of you can understand OMG NEED YOU NOW and then OMG NOW NOT SO MUCH… Dang, that sounds perfect. Probably more than most can hope for, and probably prone to more hiccups than the text above admits, but dang it’s nice to know that someone somewhere is living that way.

Some Days

Some days you wake up and it’s beautiful outside and you have the day off, and you feel pretty good physically and there’s nothing you really have to do today, and your bills are all paid, and life seems pretty ok, and then you start reading about the truly heinous shit that most of humanity seems up to, the anti-woman shit, the racist shit, the hateful bigoted “I don’t understand your point of view and I don’t want to, also science is bullshit!” shit, the shit from people you thought were on your side, the shit they say to excuse the bad shit they just did, and all the other myriad forms of shit, and holy hell it’s exhausting.

And it’s especially exhausting the day after you’ve been to a doctor and had her, instead of really helping, half-help and then suggest your drop an anvil on your own head, as a form of treatment. When you have so many people in the world talking insanity to you, and they’re people you should be able to rely on and trust, and they’re all so poisoned by the weird messages that humans have sold each other that they can’t even use their logic-makers anymore, that’s just plain scary.

So today I am tired. But I have the day off, and it’s beautiful out, and all my bills are paid, and I feel okay physically, and there are people in my life who I love with almost my whole heart, and they love me too, and so I am very lucky. And the other stuff is so tiring, but today we do not focus on that stuff, today we focus on how good things are.

Poetry, Celebrity and Skinny White Chicks

In which I ruminate on whether celebrity can trick us into accepting crap as awesomeness, even if we’re smart and thoughtful people. Hint: it can!

So last week Neil Gaiman posted something on his Tumblr about a new print/poem he has for sale. I glanced at it, thinking that I might want something else of his to hang near my treasured “The Day the Saucers Came” print in the stairwell at Timely Manor. But when I did my glancing I saw that the illustration for the poem was just another instance of the ubiquitous Skinny White Chick. Skinny White Chicks are absolutely everywhere. They’re so ever-present that I’ve come to think of them as just another form of currency. From every surface in my world both static and moving, Skinny White Chicks gape out at me. Magazine covers, billboards, television commercials, websites, everywhere you go there’s a Skinny White Chick who wants you to aspire to be her or fuck her or both. These Skinny White Chicks exist to get me to buy things and feel badly about myself. Therefore I’ve made it a practice to limit the amount of Skinny White Chicks installed on the walls of my home. Even so, I still find myself surrounded with them. Hell, my avatar is one.

The posters in my bedroom are all skinny white chicks, albeit ones I can admire:

(one Buffy, two Deaths, that always cracks me up. Gettit? Gettit?)

So back to my original point, although I usually like Gaiman’s work, the idea of another Skinny White Chick on my wall was not appealing, so I didn’t pay much more attention to the print or the poem. (I am so over the Skinny White Chick in art anyway. It’s so goddamn lazy, for one thing. There are so many visually interesting and unique ways to illustrate any concept – to just default back to <insert fuckable> shows a real lack of imagination.)

Then last night I was insomnomaniacally browsing Tumblr again and saw that Neil had posted a poem. I read the poem and it was lovely. About what’s inside women’s bodies, and how amazing it is to be able to touch them and wonder about their mysteries. But it wasn’t Neil’s poem, it was written by someone called Katie West (poem here) and was apparently in response to a poem Neil wrote. Oh! It was the poem on the poster with the SWC! I had better go read it. So I did. You can too.

Okay, what?

So Neil Gaiman writes a poem about how he’s continually disappointed by what’s underneath a woman’s clothes, because what he finds there does not ever live up to the image his imagination has aroused. Women are “awkward and less interesting” when naked. The mystery and the dream are apparently everything, and the reality is not as exciting. I could analyze this forever and place it in the larger context of our society and his unique creativity to try to make this okay, blah blah blah.

But instead of doing that, I am going to do this. Imagine it wasn’t Neil Gaiman who wrote this poem. Imagine this poem was handed to you over the cubicle wall by Skippy, the sweaty guy from accounting, who wants your opinion on it. How long would it take for you to throw it back over the wall at him, and condemn him for being a big, gross jerkhole? Sure, even Skippy from accounting has the right to express his shitbag opinion about how naked women are awkward and lose all their mystery—but nobody would want to fucking read it.

This is where I get to the point about celebrity being the only thing that would get this sort of international crapgasm not only published, but feted. What a horrible sentiment. What a terrible thing to feel, and then a terrible thing to publish and promote, especially on a print designed and illustrated with a Skinny White Chick, by an artist who works for Playboy. Apparently we’re meant to assume that even sexy siren SWC on the poster is going to be awkward and disappointing with her clothes off, too.

This is, for me, part of a large problem I have, not only with the comic industry in general, but with Gaiman’s work in particular. I really enjoy most of it, and count him among my favorite writers, but more and more it bothers me that that the women in his writing are just poorly-constructed male-fantasy figures. Manic Pixie Dream Girls and inscrutable sirens. I really need to go back and examine the Sandman works critically to see if I can prove my point with examples—but it has never left my memory that the only woman among the Endless who looks anything like me is the fucking personification of Despair.

(Note: I am not full of despair! My body is not full of despair! It’s full of joy and fun and serious thoughts and sexy thoughts and worries and troubles and hair and orgasms and stretch marks and all manner of things. It is not and never will be a vehicle of Despair. But you would not know that to look at popular media.)

This bothers me most because Gaiman is put forth (and was introduced to me) as a writer FOR women. This is the writer who will help you love graphic novels. This is the lady-default at the comic store (or was 15 or so years ago when I started reading comics.)

And if this is what we can expect from the guy who’s peddled to us as being FOR us. Then… yuck. I just imagine a 15 year old girl who loves Gaiman reading that poem. How often in a day is she told her body is not good enough, that it doesn’t match some ideal to which she should aspire. How insecure does she feel about exploring her body, letting someone else explore it? And then to read that most secret fear confirmed in print by someone like Gaiman “… hey girls, honestly when you get naked it’s a disappointment.” Will that thought resonate in her head the first time she takes her clothes off for a boy? Will she be able to concentrate on the wonderful mystery of mutual nakedness, or will she have internalized that she is just not good enough, and spend all her time playing at being perfect, rather than letting herself see and be seen (which is, after all, an important part of sexual intimacy, right?)

How irresponsible. How disappointing. How horrible that there is apparently no one around Neil Gaiman who is willing to tell him so. But no – I think at this point Neil Gaiman takes a crap and 50 sycophants rush to gold plate it for him, and sell it at a profit. Even those who have given his poem any critique have prefaced it with “I love you, but maybe…” Well hey. I don’t love Neil Gaiman. I don’t know Neil Gaiman, how could I love him? I enjoy his work. I find him talented and think he is a pretty important voice in the world. I adore the universes he has created and I am happy that I’ve had a chance to let them capture my imagination. But I don’t love him because he is a stranger. And I don’t love everything he does, because some of it is bound to be crappy. And this is crappy, and somebody has to say so.

And there you have my jumbled up point, which probably needs more reference and to be tied together with a neater bow – but it came straight out of my naked, awkward lady brain, and I do not care if you imagined it would be better. As Katie West’s poem will beautifully tell you, you are lucky you got access to it at all.

Spring Stasis

This winter has been pretty challenging for me. Nothing that I can’t handle, and really nothing compared to previous years I’ve dealt with – but still it’s been hard. Between family insanity due to serious illness, and friend/social circle craziness and some limited work craziness, I have really just wanted to go home every day and stick my head back under the covers. Almost* every single person I deal with feels like a huge drain on my emotions, rather than a support or a source of strength. Sometimes I just want to start greeting everyone with “Oh hey, Complication. It’s been awhile! What you got for me today?”

You know for some reason, it’s never “Hey source of Delight! How lovely to speak to you! Thanks for not needing anything, or presenting me with a horror! I will take this Joy you’re offering and eat it like a sweet cake!”

I’ve been hoping that spring might find me more willing to go out and engage with the world, but so far it’s not happening. For one thing, my house is so perfect. Life inside it is so happy and peaceful and quiet, why bother with Outside? And for another… well like I said, nobody is really soothing my soul at the moment.

But I did get out the other week to see Griffin House at the Old Rock House, and it was an amazing acoustic set. God, I love him even more live. He writes a lot about his family, his grandfather in particular is featured in several of his songs. He has a song called “The Way I Was Made” about being part of a family story, and how good it feels to look at his relatives and know that their blood is flowing in his veins. And while I was listening to that song I realized that I had no idea what that felt like. To be proud of the people from whom you come, to look at your extended relations, or even immediate, and recognize yourself and be happy about that. With the truly soul-shriveling family shit I’ve dealt with this winter, the only thing I feel when I look at my family is cringing horror. I don’t even want to know these people, much less be related to them. And listening to this man sing about his pride in his family was such a shock – I had forgotten that everyone didn’t hate where they came from.

It’s another thing I will never have, a thing that I thought I’d gotten over years ago, honestly. That need to be fostered and parented. And mostly I am over it. I am grown, I re-parented my own damn self and did a fine job, I think. But sometimes as much as you think you’ve buffered your psyche against what they can throw at you, families raise the bar on fucking crazy, and you find yourself sucked back in.

Anyway, if you need me I’ll be back at Timely Manor, reading a book and listening to good music and wandering around in my PJ pants. It’s nice here, and until you can show me something better, here is where I’ll be.

Here is more Griffin House, one of his songs I love best. It’s about being connected to someone who actually doesn’t sound awful. Maybe it’s as much of a fantasy as actually loving your family, but hey, it’s a nice song.

The Night Owl’s Witching Hour

4pm, regardless of whether I am saving daylight or not, is my witching hour. In the weekends, during the morning I am little better than a slug.

“Never doing anything again mmpfh.” I mutter as I sink back into my sheets.

I might wander around and let the dogs out and grab a snack, but there will be nothing of consequence accomplished. I will plan to nap until bedtime and then go to sleep.

And then somehow at 4pm, things start looking… doable. “I could run to the store. Get that stuff for the project I was planning. I could get food for dinner. Gas up the car. Do the laundry. Clean this baseboard. Yes. Take a shower! Paint my nails! Put on underpants!”

Anything seems possible after 4pm. And it’s been this way for years, and I don’t know why, but it’s still true and I just go with it. By the way, I got a shit ton done today. More in the last three hours than most people did all day, I bet. But no use asking me to start at 3. At 3 everything is still impossible.

Everything

Life keeps alternating between everything being so perfect I can’t find the words to write about it, and everything being so awful that there is no way to convey it.

That’s just life I guess, and lately it takes a lot of processing.

Funky

Tonight I have:

Freshly washed hair

Freshly shaved legs

Freshly baked cookies

Freshly washed sheets

Freshly painted hot pink fingernails

Somehow the addition of the word “fresh” makes everything better by a thousandfold, does it not? I was not in the mood to do any of those things, the laundry, the cooking, the grooming. But now that they’re all done, I am replete, and life is good. Don’t you wish you could go back and explain to your punk-rock, adventure hungry self that the simplest things are going to bring you the most pleasure?

Or maybe we had to go through the punk rock painful adventures to discover for ourselves what freshly changed sheets will really mean, alone in your quiet house on a Sunday evening.

Define Kind

You say he is kind, but it is not kindness to shut down emotionally and force you into the position of figuring out what he needs from you. There is no amount of sad or ill that excuses routinely treating someone badly when you can possibly prevent it.

Once again Captain Awkward knocks it out of the park. Sometimes people have an aura of haplessness/hopelessness about them that makes you think they’re harmless to you. Like, they couldn’t even get it together enough to hurt you if they concentrated on it. They seem “nice.” But seeming nice (not actively being a raging assface) and being nice (taking care of yourself and not harming those around you, even on accident) are two very different beasts.

You can take home a wounded puppy, and it will be cute and break your heart with its antics, but you have to spend a significant amount of time cleaning pee out of your rugs. And men who are wounded puppies will never grow out of pissing on your floor, not as long as they know you will be there to mop it up.

Cold, Hard Facts

From Animals Talking in all Caps

Consuming Media Consumption

I used to listen to NPR because it made me feel smart. I liked to hear the issues of the day and learn more. I liked to talk to other people about “Things I Heard on NPR This Morning.” Often I was offended, or heartbroken to hear that news, but I appreciated the insightful commentary, and I liked learning new things. Listening to NPR made me feel like a grownup. I liberal, worldly grownup.

I stopped reading the New York Review of Books in 2005 because it continuously made me feel frustrated and stupid. Every article I read felt like an assemblage of knowledge I’d somehow skipped, and therefore an accusation of idiocy and sloth. Why did I not know these things about the situation in Palestine, the history of the Congo? About André Malraux? I felt as if every richly detail-laden article was a rebuke, more knowledge that I should have acquired by now. How did I bumble through the world not knowing the definition of precoetanean?

I think a lot of that came from some internalized inferiority regarding my middle-class education. I went to an OK high school, and found it no challenge. I went to an OK college, and found it no challenge either. I’ve always thought there was some brilliant upper-class of others, the people who really understood what was going on, the people who read the classics and had encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything that ever happened in world history and could also pithily sum up all current events by referencing Molière. And then they’d laugh together and drink red wine and manage their wealth for awhile.

It took me a long time to realize that the purpose of the articles in the NYROB was to educate the reader. That this was not a compendium of facts everyone else in the world knew, it was meant to give readers a framework to understand current written works, and see how they fit into history and (if existing) the body of work already surrounding that particular issue. (It seems strange to me, now, that I didn’t understand that. I think maybe the word “review” was what confused me. That and the aforementioned inferiority thing.)  But gradually, as I became less defensive about those things I didn’t know, I was able to embrace learning as an adult. Educating myself, continuing to gain new knowledge, not because I was playing catch-up with the rest of “educated” society, but just because I wanted to know more things. Knowing things is awesome. And everyone I know is way smarter than me in some area. Everyone has their specialty, and constantly expecting myself to have no knowledge gaps at all is pretentious and obnoxious and stressful, and takes away the joy of learning things from people I trust and respect.

That said, I still listen to NPR, and doing so still makes me feel smart. But now it makes me feel that way not because I am learning new things, but because I can now identify as total horseshit 85% of what the commentators on NPR have to say. Not only do I gain in facts as I age, I gain in the certainty of my own ability to apply logic. So I hear what they’re saying, and I know they’re full of horseshit, and that does make me feel smart. But not in a self-congratulatory, pleased way. In a sad, aggravated way.

Anyway, the point of this all is that my $3.95/month Kindle subscription to the New York Review of Books is the best media I’ve spent money on this year. Yay for learning things, yay for not feeling guilty for needing to learn them, yay for additional facts leading to better reasoning ability. And especial yay for confidence that your brain is going to help you make your way in the world.

Half-Thoughts

A very happy and busy life has been getting in the way of my blogging for the past several months. And that’s just fine, I think. I miss sitting down and forming my thoughts into a semi-choate wordmass, but I will get back to that at some point. For now I just like letting them swirl around in my head, like happy iridescent fish who’ve just been fed.

Anyway, was reading NYROB review of “Boomerang” about the global financial quagmire we’re in. (I’ve yet to read the book, too much on my reading list.) And according to the review the book deals with how the financial crisis played out differently in each country, depending on its moral character. Which plays into a half-formed thought I have, or a few of them, about how a decline in (gasp) morality (ungasp) is part of what has led to our financial undoing. And that decline in personal morality has perhaps followed the decline in organized religion in most of the Western world. (Insofar as organized religion prescribed the ways people were expected and allowed to behave, and most communities’ cohesive religious attitudes formed societies that were self-policing, so this code of ethics was enforced by everyone. The decline of organized religion combined with industrialization thus leading to the dissolution of the sense of community that keeps people acting right.)

Now, far from arguing that we need a return to religion, which I loathe for all its atrocities and hocus pocus nonsensical insistence that everyone abandon logic, I am starting to wonder if what we’re in now is not some kind of proving ground for humanity. Can we move PAST personal morality dictated by supernatural entities and enforced by the mob, to a new kind of personal and collective morality, in which we all act in the ways that best support our society? And to do that, do we have to unglobalize ourselves, and get back to tribes that share core values? Or are there some universal human values that we can agree on? And how many hundreds or thousands of years will it be until we reach that consensus?

But until we reject avarice and irresponsibility and consumption WITHOUT using religion as our reason for doing so, until we just understand that some things are wrong because they make life worse for everybody, I believe things will continue to cycle good/bad (probably with some violence thrown in to get us back to good, before we decline back to bad.) Anyway, that’s today’s half-thought. Maybe some of you will finish digesting it for me, I am on to other things.

Epiphany

So, the bathroom nearest my office gets a lot of use. It’s the only lady’s bathroom on this floor, and there’s only one toilet in there. Also, it’s pretty private, so it seems like every single lady in this building comes here to poop.

Frequently there are Bad Smells in that bathroom, and since there’s poor air circulation, and some environmental nutbags insist on turn off the lights when they leave (the lights and exhaust fan are controlled by the same switch) well, it’s not always a pleasant situation. (I mean, save some energy, sure, but not at the expense of every person coming in after you gagging.)

I’ve also noticed over the years that some women wear way too much perfume. Like, perfume that lingers in the bathroom like a terrible unhappy doom cloud. And I’ve also noticed that lots of times when there is a perfume cloud of doom in there, there’s also a poop-stink cloud of doom as well. My mind drew the natural conclusion and decided for itself that women who wear a lot of cologne also take the stinkiest dumps. I didn’t know why, I didn’t really think about why. Maybe women who wear too much perfume also eat lots of things that make them poop extra stinky. But it became a fact in my head—these perfume-wearing bitches and their stinky, stinky dumps.

After several years, it just today occurred to me that rather than there being a perfume/poop correlation, a more likely explanation is that some women take a stinky poop, then spray perfume to cover up the smell!

I think I had never considered this before because it’s so outside the realm of something I would do. For one, I don’t tend to carry perfume around with me, not feeling that multiple perfume applications during the day are advisable or necessary. For two, although I don’t want to smell poop when I don’t have to, I have always preferred the smell of an honest poop to the smell of poop camouflaged with flowers or pine trees or lemons or some other random thing. Poop rarely improves when combined with other scents.

Anyway, now I am laughing at myself because I have been giving the side-eye to ladies with excessive perfume for years, knowing how above-average stinky their poops are.

Sorry ladies, I guess your poops are probably normal. But also, lighten up on the perfume anyway? kthanx

How Fortunate the Kingdom of the Blind

I’ve long thought how lucky we are that we can’t see what’s coming at us. I think if any of us could see the future, we’d refuse to leave our beds, and just fucking give up. I mean, sure there’d be some industrious bastard who was all “I will rail against my fate!” and they’d make a movie about that guy. Or there’d be some jerks who were all “Better get all my living in while I have time!” But most of us, I think, faced with the truth of what was in store for us, would be utterly unable to absorb it, or believe that life had any meaning or purpose at all. It would be impossible to dream and make plans, knowing they would not come true.

And one of the things about keeping a blog, or a journal, or any kind of record of what you are doing or feeling at any given time, is that of course you can go back and revisit yourself. That’s part of the point of it. Going back  to see a younger, more innocent you. And younger, innocent you might already be jaded and cynical, but truly you have no idea how bad it’s really going to get. And you look back at yourself, and you want to scream out a warning, like you’re watching a horror movie unfold. But it’s too late now, kid.

Sometimes it’s charming to go back and read the fun you were having, and see that you’ve made progress or that you still feel exactly the same. But mostly you look back and you see what you didn’t know, glaring behind the lines.

A year before they went away, an hour before you fell, two weeks before the surgery, three days before you found out.

Every single minute of every single day we are “x” amount of time before the next tragic thing. And thank god we don’t know it, that there are not sands slipping away in hourglasses over our heads. Because honestly, who could go on in the face of it? It is enough to paralyze, even in thinking about it. Which is why, I suppose, I am advised not to think of it.

The Conundrum of the Friendly Pharmacist

You know, I guess it’s hard to be a personable/outgoing pharmacist, because lots of times you’re seeing people who are sick, or who are helping out other people who are sick, and so you’re not seeing them at the best of times. But still, it’s hard to interact with a friendly pharmacist.

My pharmacist: “Hey, how’s everything going, how have you been?”
My outer voice: “Great, fine, just trying to keep cool in this weather!”
My inner voice: “If you look at the fucking prescriptions you’re handing me, obviously things are not all that fucking great.”

Just another reason that being in the Outside World is so tiring. How many nonsensical interactions like that must I perform on a daily basis? “Super! Everything’s fine!” (“WTF, I am on fire.”)

Society is goofy.