![failbetter:
mutedgloss:
Last night at the grocery store, a businessey woman asked me, “Is it Friday yet?” in the most painfully suburban manner possible.
I wanted to beat her head in with my butternut squash.
I don’t want to be one of those people, I don’t want to identify with them, and I don’t want them to mistakenly assume that I share any sense of commonality or fraternity with them. They aren’t bad people. The office/business/finance 9-5ers with their big cars & garages & very different backgrounds/expectations/ideas from me have been marketed to seem so benign & necessary to our culture that I cannot help but feel suspicious about them. So much of what I believe and intellectually consume tells me to be wary of them.
They are far from harmless.
Why would she think that I would be a resonable person to share that sentiment with?
Where’s my fucking nose ring? (lol)
Also, I find it insulting that so many forget that not everyone gets a weekend. Retail doesn’t, that’s for sure. Neither do grad school students that have weekly Saturday morning class obligations at museums, either.
Not to mention regular 9-5 people (or, uh, 7-3 people, in my case) who love their jobs. I regularly forget that a “weekend” is coming up and by Sunday I’m always pumped for Monday.
The collective blah re: the cloudy weather, the Monday-Friday work week, or whatever else it’s “normal” to complain about — it’s nonsensical. People need to reexamine their lives and stop making negative small talk with complete strangers while assuming that those strangers share even the most insignificant of mores or beliefs. Dammit, where is my Gesellschaft?
But what I’m really reblogging to say is: holy shit that is a beautiful stapler.
Oh, come off it.
First off, “suburban” as an insult cracks me up: there are few shticks more tired than the supposedly urbane urbanite looking down his nose at the benighted, two-and-a-half kids, two-SUVs-and-an-attached-garage suburbanite. There are good reasons for the fact that many intelligent, educated, even aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated (no joke!) people move to the suburbs. Lileks is particularly funny on this stale burbs-bashing trend. Read him. Open your mind, which seems to be ironically narrow on this particular subject.
More generally, though, your insistence that you don’t want “9-5ers” to think that you have anything in common with them, that you simply “don’t want to identify with them” is goofily bigoted. You say “They aren’t bad people,” but you hardly seem to believe it, as evidenced by the fact that you feel the need to say it. Apparently these “businessey” drones and their nominal humanity are still best kept beyond the reach of your ten-foot pole, lest you be infected by their greed and complacency.
Here is a fact: not everyone has the luxury of a job that nourishes their soul, burnishes their artistic cred, or inflates the high-flying blimp of their moral superiority. You may not either, not forever. Even if you are in a line of work that you find deeply significant, creative, and ethically fulfilling, that doesn’t mean that some weeks won’t be a drag, that you won’t grow weary and discouraged, or that sometimes Friday won’t be longed for, and celebrated when it comes. You might find yourself occasionally “identifying” with the putative mindless sheep, the workaday hoi-polloi—you might eventually welcome their knowing looks in the grocery store checkout, their friendly commiserations via age-old bromides about another day another dollar and time to make the doughnuts and the whole corny idiom of the daily grind. Because, in fact, they are human beings with more in common with you than not, and their line of work or choice of places to live does not make them not worth your time. Both of you seem to be aware of the non-novelty and mockability of your own social types (the butternut squash, the nose ring, the German academic buzzword); hopefully that awareness might be the beginnings of a more mature humility, a subtler sympathy for those outside that Gesellschaft of yours.
Ahem. End rant. Bloviating, maybe, but I hope it’s not self-flattery to deny that I’m doing it from a high horse. [Edited for harshness:] OK, maybe from a pony, or one of those miniature horses…](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kyprnnXbAz1qzdgelo1_500.jpg "failbetter:
mutedgloss:
Last night at the grocery store, a businessey woman asked me, “Is it Friday yet?” in the most painfully suburban manner possible.
I wanted to beat her head in with my butternut squash.
I don’t want to be one of those people, I don’t want to identify with them, and I don’t want them to mistakenly assume that I share any sense of commonality or fraternity with them. They aren’t bad people. The office/business/finance 9-5ers with their big cars & garages & very different backgrounds/expectations/ideas from me have been marketed to seem so benign & necessary to our culture that I cannot help but feel suspicious about them. So much of what I believe and intellectually consume tells me to be wary of them.
They are far from harmless.
Why would she think that I would be a resonable person to share that sentiment with?
Where’s my fucking nose ring? (lol)
Also, I find it insulting that so many forget that not everyone gets a weekend. Retail doesn’t, that’s for sure. Neither do grad school students that have weekly Saturday morning class obligations at museums, either.
Not to mention regular 9-5 people (or, uh, 7-3 people, in my case) who love their jobs. I regularly forget that a “weekend” is coming up and by Sunday I’m always pumped for Monday.
The collective blah re: the cloudy weather, the Monday-Friday work week, or whatever else it’s “normal” to complain about — it’s nonsensical. People need to reexamine their lives and stop making negative small talk with complete strangers while assuming that those strangers share even the most insignificant of mores or beliefs. Dammit, where is my Gesellschaft?
But what I’m really reblogging to say is: holy shit that is a beautiful stapler.
Oh, come off it.
First off, “suburban” as an insult cracks me up: there are few shticks more tired than the supposedly urbane urbanite looking down his nose at the benighted, two-and-a-half kids, two-SUVs-and-an-attached-garage suburbanite. There are good reasons for the fact that many intelligent, educated, even aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated (no joke!) people move to the suburbs. Lileks is particularly funny on this stale burbs-bashing trend. Read him. Open your mind, which seems to be ironically narrow on this particular subject.
More generally, though, your insistence that you don’t want “9-5ers” to think that you have anything in common with them, that you simply “don’t want to identify with them” is goofily bigoted. You say “They aren’t bad people,” but you hardly seem to believe it, as evidenced by the fact that you feel the need to say it. Apparently these “businessey” drones and their nominal humanity are still best kept beyond the reach of your ten-foot pole, lest you be infected by their greed and complacency.
Here is a fact: not everyone has the luxury of a job that nourishes their soul, burnishes their artistic cred, or inflates the high-flying blimp of their moral superiority. You may not either, not forever. Even if you are in a line of work that you find deeply significant, creative, and ethically fulfilling, that doesn’t mean that some weeks won’t be a drag, that you won’t grow weary and discouraged, or that sometimes Friday won’t be longed for, and celebrated when it comes. You might find yourself occasionally “identifying” with the putative mindless sheep, the workaday hoi-polloi—you might eventually welcome their knowing looks in the grocery store checkout, their friendly commiserations via age-old bromides about another day another dollar and time to make the doughnuts and the whole corny idiom of the daily grind. Because, in fact, they are human beings with more in common with you than not, and their line of work or choice of places to live does not make them not worth your time. Both of you seem to be aware of the non-novelty and mockability of your own social types (the butternut squash, the nose ring, the German academic buzzword); hopefully that awareness might be the beginnings of a more mature humility, a subtler sympathy for those outside that Gesellschaft of yours.
Ahem. End rant. Bloviating, maybe, but I hope it’s not self-flattery to deny that I’m doing it from a high horse. [Edited for harshness:] OK, maybe from a pony, or one of those miniature horses…")
Last night at the grocery store, a businessey woman asked me, “Is it Friday yet?” in the most painfully suburban manner possible.
I wanted to beat her head in with my butternut squash.
I don’t want to be one of those people, I don’t want to identify with them, and I don’t want them to mistakenly assume that I share any sense of commonality or fraternity with them. They aren’t bad people. The office/business/finance 9-5ers with their big cars & garages & very different backgrounds/expectations/ideas from me have been marketed to seem so benign & necessary to our culture that I cannot help but feel suspicious about them. So much of what I believe and intellectually consume tells me to be wary of them.
They are far from harmless.
Why would she think that I would be a resonable person to share that sentiment with?
Where’s my fucking nose ring? (lol)
Also, I find it insulting that so many forget that not everyone gets a weekend. Retail doesn’t, that’s for sure. Neither do grad school students that have weekly Saturday morning class obligations at museums, either.
Not to mention regular 9-5 people (or, uh, 7-3 people, in my case) who love their jobs. I regularly forget that a “weekend” is coming up and by Sunday I’m always pumped for Monday.
The collective blah re: the cloudy weather, the Monday-Friday work week, or whatever else it’s “normal” to complain about — it’s nonsensical. People need to reexamine their lives and stop making negative small talk with complete strangers while assuming that those strangers share even the most insignificant of mores or beliefs. Dammit, where is my Gesellschaft?
But what I’m really reblogging to say is: holy shit that is a beautiful stapler.
Oh, come off it.
First off, “suburban” as an insult cracks me up: there are few shticks more tired than the supposedly urbane urbanite looking down his nose at the benighted, two-and-a-half kids, two-SUVs-and-an-attached-garage suburbanite. There are good reasons for the fact that many intelligent, educated, even aesthetically and intellectually sophisticated (no joke!) people move to the suburbs. Lileks is particularly funny on this stale burbs-bashing trend. Read him. Open your mind, which seems to be ironically narrow on this particular subject.
More generally, though, your insistence that you don’t want “9-5ers” to think that you have anything in common with them, that you simply “don’t want to identify with them” is goofily bigoted. You say “They aren’t bad people,” but you hardly seem to believe it, as evidenced by the fact that you feel the need to say it. Apparently these “businessey” drones and their nominal humanity are still best kept beyond the reach of your ten-foot pole, lest you be infected by their greed and complacency.
Here is a fact: not everyone has the luxury of a job that nourishes their soul, burnishes their artistic cred, or inflates the high-flying blimp of their moral superiority. You may not either, not forever. Even if you are in a line of work that you find deeply significant, creative, and ethically fulfilling, that doesn’t mean that some weeks won’t be a drag, that you won’t grow weary and discouraged, or that sometimes Friday won’t be longed for, and celebrated when it comes. You might find yourself occasionally “identifying” with the putative mindless sheep, the workaday hoi-polloi—you might eventually welcome their knowing looks in the grocery store checkout, their friendly commiserations via age-old bromides about another day another dollar and time to make the doughnuts and the whole corny idiom of the daily grind. Because, in fact, they are human beings with more in common with you than not, and their line of work or choice of places to live does not make them not worth your time. Both of you seem to be aware of the non-novelty and mockability of your own social types (the butternut squash, the nose ring, the German academic buzzword); hopefully that awareness might be the beginnings of a more mature humility, a subtler sympathy for those outside that Gesellschaft of yours.
Ahem. End rant. Bloviating, maybe, but I hope it’s not self-flattery to deny that I’m doing it from a high horse. [Edited for harshness:] OK, maybe from a pony, or one of those miniature horses…
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