Live from New York!

Recently I've been watching some older Saturday Night Live episodes from the early 2000's, back when the cast included Darrell Hammond, Will Ferrell, Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph, Horatio Sanz, a young Amy Poehler and Tina Fey and of course, Jimmy Fallon. While the cast is always evolving and in my opinion always bringing really fresh and talented commedians onto the cast, this was definitely one of it's shining moments in SNL player history.

I noticed that there seemed to be a ton more breaking (laughter during a scene that breaks character) than I was used to in present-day SNL. To help you understand this phenomenon, I've created a quick and easy guide to tell whether or not the players are going to break during any given skit.

Dear 16-year-old self

In this book famous people write letters to themselves when they were 16 years old. It's a fun idea, and it's prompted thousands (if not more) blog posts about what you would say to yourself if you could go back in time and talk to your 16-year-old-self. Obviously, the whole thing is preposterous because you've already lived the time between being 16 and now so nothing about that could possibly change, but everyone has a little fascination with both time travel and the concept of "oh if only I'd known...". Although I'm not that far removed from being 16, obviously a lot has changed in the...um...8 years since.

Dear 16-year-old Kate,

Guess what? You made it out. You live in Baltimore. You still haven't traveled the world, but Baltimore is pretty diverse, so in the end it's really not that bad. Also, you made it to Europe again, but it wasn't nearly as fun as the first time.

And guess what you're not doing? You are totally not writing musicals. In fact, you haven't touched a piano in a couple years. Is that really what you thought you'd be good at? You'll later learn that your talents lie elsewhere and that your musical talents will be restricted to impromptu dance parties in your living room in front of your husband.

That's right. Husband. You fell in love and got married at the age of 21. I know, right? What were you thinking? Marriage is really hard. (*note: Write letter to self at age of 21.) Everything that everyone has told you about marriage is wrong. First of all, you can't train a husband. He is who he is and that's that. Second of all, there are no rules or tricks to staying happy, such as weekly date nights or turning off the TV once a week. Those are great ways to stay connected, but they don't even scratch the surface of what's really beneath a marriage. The third thing no one tells you is that it's so much more than the little things, like housework and money. It's about really big things. Like major life things. You will be completely unprepared to face these challenges at that age. There's nothing you can do to be ready for this. But most importantly, Kate, marriage will bring you unbridled joy, comfort and satisfaction. The knowledge that you face nothing alone is worth every bad date, every fight and every tear shed. Your brain will rewire itself to love him, and no one else. All other men will seem inferior to your husband, even the richer ones. And for the second time in your life, you will find that there is great power in healing. Oh, and your wedding will be absolutely beautiful and perfect.

I can't even begin to tell you how unimportant popularity is in the real world. You really need to stop worrying about it and just be yourself. In adulthood, the people who are the most interesting and the most happy are the people who are comfortable with themselves, who don't worry about the approval of the masses. Sure, there's something to be said for fitting in, but you don't need to compromise who you are to do this.

I kind of hate to tell you this, but you turn out just like your parents. Don't worry, for the most part, you have all their good qualities and few of their bad qualities, but don't be so shocked when you find yourself yelling at your husband for using the wrong pair of scissors to cut open a bag. It's in your genetics and there's really nothing you can do about it.

You'll finally stop biting your nails, but you'll overcompensate with a sick obsession for keeping your nails perfectly manicured. You will still find yourself obsessing over colors but eventually you'll learn to manage this. You'll discover greek food, alcohol, high heels, eye liner, and bbq ribs and you won't be able to live without those things. And for the love of God, you will stop wearing silver eye shadow.

My advice to you is to be yourself, treat your body and your mind with respect, stay in school, pray often, be choosy with your friends and lay off the booze, but most importantly, love yourself. It will take you years to understand just how right your parents were when they said you must love yourself before you can love others, but this is an absolute infallible truth in life.

Your life will turn out to be pretty awesome, surrounded by wonderful and intelligent people who challenge you and love you. You will discover that you have a kind heart and a rebellious spirit. You'll begin to appreciate things like discipline and hard work. You will care about things like gender and marriage equality and use words like "heteronormative" and "gender binary". You will plant flowers and keep them alive. A black man will inspire a nation and become president. You will really really care about this.

Oh, and Kate, in a few years, someone will suggest that you go to a bar called The Depot. Say no. Trust me on this one.

Love,
Me

love so sweet

I've been sitting on a post about name change for a while now, unable to really finalize it in a way that I feel properly expresses that decision in my life, probably because I just can't seem to think straight lately.

My birthday is next week, so I've been reflecting a little on who I am and who I am becoming. It's a little uncomfortable to be honest. I've been so focused on the repairing of one relationship that I've let all the others fall to the wayside, including my relationship with myself. But the sun is out and the world is spinning and I'm going to take advantage of this summer to clear my head and refocus. The recognition of that is a blessing in itself. I thank my God for that.

what doesn't kill us is making us stronger

I recently experienced 10-months of unemployment. During that time I had periods of usefulness and periods of time where I really took life by the reins, but for most of it I caught up on television. So in the interest of full disclosure, I very recently watched every single episode of Roseanne from start to finish. I watched it pretty often as a kid, both during prime-time and in reruns, but as an "adult" (I think we all know why that's in quotations) I have a whole new appreciation for both Roseanne Barr and the show. During my 2 week long Roseannathon I followed Roseanne and Dan’s several career changes and bad financial decisions; Becky, Darlene and DJ growing up from kids into adults (and in the case of Becky, into a whole new person entirely); and I even watched the last season where Dan was mostly absent and the Conners won the lottery. I was so obsessed with watching it I stay up until 2:00 and 3:00am trying to fit in as many episodes as possible until I crashed, and when it was time to watch the season finale, I sat in the bathroom watching it on my phone in the middle of the night. Spoiler alert: Dan died, and I bawled my eyes out. Husband was pretty pissed when he found out I was crying about Roseanne instead of a real problem.

The Conners were down to Earth and real. Yes, many of the problems they faced were no more than your average situational comedy plots, but many of them were “firsts” of that generation, like leading characters who were overweight and a realistic blue collar family, and that dealt with taboo topics like birth control, social class and sex (fat seks at that!). And you know what, they fought with each other. The way real families fight. Not the way TV families fight, but the way you and I fought with our parents, our partners and our employers. (Okay, maybe we’ve never instigated a walk-out, but you know what I mean.)

Anyway, it’s not news that Roseanne is a progressive feminist and absolutely totally fucking awesome, but recently she’s been making her rounds back into the spotlight, and it couldn’t be better. I mean, she’s still kind of fat, but is visibly happy and healthy, and *gasp* she has gray hair. Let me rephrase. She is ROCKING the gray hair. Could I love her any more than I already do? Apparently I can.

So when this article was recently published in New York Magazine about Roseanne being a domestic goddess and a feminist pioneer (and subsequently made its rounds on the feminist blogosphere) I just had to make my comments on it. It’s totally worth the read but if you find it too lengthy here is my favorite highlight.

"Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you. Based on Two and a Half Men’s success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world’s most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife -sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn’t make it right! People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the 'culture.'"

You say it, sistah! There's almost nothing progressive on TV anymore. And don't even think about commenting about how Modern Family or The Closer or The L-Word or Murphy Brown whatever fucking show you think is so progressive is truly modernizing television. They're not really. I'm not saying Roseanne was a total game changer. In fact, it obviously wasn't, because even Roseanne claims that it was "television’s first feminist and working-class-family sitcom (also its last)."

But in reality, I think Roseanne's shining feminist moment was in the very last episode in her revealing monologue. She said:

"We didn’t hit our children as we were hit, we didn’t demand their unquestioning silence, and we didn’t teach our daughters to sacrifice more than our sons.

As a modern wife, I walked a tight rope between tradition and progress, and usually, I failed by one outsider’s standards or anothers. But I figured out that neither winning nor losing count for women like they do for men. We women are the ones who transform everything we touch — and nothing on earth is higher than that."

Well to the major networks and the cable stations, I say: You've underestimated us. Trust us, we can handle it. Just try it. And don't be snarks about it. Do it for real. We're capable of handling it. And don't say you don't know how to create a progressive, real tv show that's also funny and gets high ratings. We have faith in you. We know you can do it :)

And for a little fun, the funniest Roseanne moment ever. Guess what? Sometimes parents are irresponsible. And it's fucking hilarious.

And for good measure, here's the closing song from the finale, because not only was the message a pivotal part of the show, but because it signaled the end of my Roseannathon, and I'm still grieving.

all up under the covers day

I know this is a week late, but this video is finally on youtube. This is one of my "bad feminist" moments, but this song just never gets old. I laugh every single time. :)

community

Well, last night I had a bit of a breakdown at the Ruby Tuesday. No, it wasn’t over the lack of pasta salad at the salad bar (although that would certainly be a cry-worthy situation) it was over my frustration about my community.

A little backstory: Last night, husband and I attended our local community improvement association meeting. Now, because of a previous life endeavor, I have been to a lot of local community associations. Some are far more productive than others, but they all have one common thread: only old people attend community meetings. Additionally, unless a community is overwhelmingly a majority-minority, only white people attend community meetings. That’s not to say that your community meeting isn’t diverse, or that there aren’t community meetings where lots of young people show up, but after attending literally dozens of these things in a few months time, I can conclude that this is true of more meetings than not. Of course, our community meeting was no different. We were literally the youngest people in the room, and the next youngest were my in-laws. This is no exaggeration. Although my community is easily at least 30% African American and has a very noticeable and young Spanish-speaking population (due to the prevalence of Spanish-speaking church services in the area, or vice versa) every single person at this well-attended community meeting was white.

Without going into too much detail, community members vocalized their opinions on issues of illegal immigration, homelessness and class issues, and the gay community (in reference to the recently failed attempt to pass an equal marriage bill in our state’s legislature.) And then, one of our elected officials told us, with a visible eye-roll, that he was sure the “gay community” would be bringing “it” (the bill) back next year. I’m resisting the urge to say anything negative about this person because while I don’t respect his service to our community, he is a friend and so I’ll leave it at that. But the blatant disregard for who supported this bill was appalling. And don’t you worry, everyone had an opinion, whether it was on their face or on their lips.

All of those opinions were racist, intolerant, hateful, and/or ignorant. None of them were related to actually “improving” the community.

I held back tears looking at the faces of people who are grandmas, grandpas, and respected community elders while realizing that they were completely and unashamedly racist. The place I called home was suddenly completely foreign to me.

It’s at this point that I think most young people interested in change find themselves at a crossroads. You can leave and go somewhere young and vibrant that is accepting and open to their entire community, but only adding to the epidemic that young progressives are moving away, or you can stay and try to change the community around you at the risk of living your whole life in those miserable racist conditions and never seeing any improvement.

And so, I cried.

“All these people are so racist and intolerant. I can’t stand it. It’s offensive to me. I’m not proud to call this place home. I don’t want to live here. We can’t change the community. I’m scared you will turn into one of them. I don’t want to be them. We’re not them. I hate it here.”

Husband generally deals with my sobbing over social issues with a fair amount of tact. He understands why I’m upset, but usually doesn’t quite get why I’d cry over it. But husband has recently been in a pretty good mood, so he tried his best to just humor me and prevent it from turning into a scene the rest of the Ruby Tuesday patrons would tweet about.

Obviously, not everyone in my community is racist or intolerant. And obviously, all communities deal with some element of racism no matter how progressive and accepting they are. And to be fair, old people are generally the ones who show up to these kinds of things because they have the freedom to spend time worrying about their community because they’re not working or taking care of young children. But this larger social issue of communities pushing away young progressives in favor of the status quo is not going to resolve itself if people don’t step up and get involved where they live.

Ultimately, I don’t know what we’ll end up doing, staying to fix it or leaving it behind. Right now, though, we live here, and we do what we can. Last night I didn’t have the courage to speak up, but next time I will. And next time my elected official starts running his mouth about the “gay community”, maybe I will take my husband’s advice and run against him.

finally

Thank you. I've been waiting all week for someone to do this. (link)

My favorite part about this "iconic" image is that according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton she may have just been putting up her hand before a cough due to seasonal allergies. And that, I'm inclined to believe, because if she even thought for a second that it was due to shock, I think she would have said that. And additionally, she is the only person who looks shocked. Everyone else looks like they're watching a late 80's sexual harassment video. I wish there was a photo of great relief on the face of the president at some point. But as many articles have recently pointed out, what's going on in the president's head and what we see on his face are nearly always two different things.