Adventures of a Gay Yuppie
It’s Wednesday! You’ve survived halfway through the week.
Reward yourself with Uh Huh Her’s first music video, “Not a Love Song.” (Secretly I wish to befriend all of the lipstick lesbians in the world. Starting with Leisha Hailey.)
There’s a unicorn!
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Stephen J. Dubner over at the Freakonomics blog asked a bunch of “smart people,” What Is the Future of Suburbia?
One of those smart people is Gary Gates, PhD. He thinks the suburbs are going to become very, very gay.
Suburbs, home ownership, and marriage — what’s left but the kids? In 1990, fewer than one in ten same-sex couples had children. Today, it’s more like one in five. In states like Mississippi, South Dakota, Alaska, South Carolina, and Louisiana, it’s one in three. The gay-by boom is alive and well in small town and suburban America. And these new parents are largely non-white. African-American and Latino/a lesbians and gay men are two to three times more likely than their white counterparts to be raising kids.
So back to the question at hand — my vision of suburbia circa 2050. Lesbian and gay families will be a much more visible community fixture. They’ll probably be married, own their homes, be raising a few kids, and will very likely not be white.
Cool.
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I was mean to someone tonight, but it all worked out and I made a new blogger friend instead.
He’s Jun Loayza from Living the Startup Life. I noticed him after one of his posts came up on the Brazen Careerist homepage.
When I clicked over to his blog to leave a comment, I was pretty shocked by his original title.
The editor for the Brazen Careerist network (of which I am a member) decided that “In My Experience, Sex is Probably Overrated” was a stronger title than the original “Sex is Overrated.”
Really, Brazen Careerist editor? Really?
For one thing (and correct me if I’m wrong, gentle readers), “in my experience” is already implied. The Brazen Careerist is a network of personal bloggers. Just about any post on the network could theoretically be prefixed with “in my experience,” but that adds no meaning or value. It only adds extra wordiness to an otherwise eye-popping, attention-grabbing title.
But the bigger crime is the “Probably.” What a surefire way to sound like you lack confidence! In the edited title, it sounds like Jun is unsure of his central thesis when in fact he is opinionated and articulate.
However, this isn’t an attack on the Brazen Careerist editor(s). (Even though they never feature my witty, witty posts… grrr.) I’m sure they’ve got a lot of blog posts to deal with and didn’t give this title much thought at all.
This is a life lesson. Really.
The lesson is this: Other people do not care about you. Not as much as you do. At the end of the day, you’re the one who looks dull when your article/report/blog gets edited into mediocrity.
Is this particular an example a big deal? No… well, not to me. But that’s the point: Maybe it’s a big deal to Jun. What if this blog post had been his personal shining moment of glory?
I run into similar scenarios nearly everyday at work, where I help our clients develop websites. There are generally two types of client.
Guess which one ends up with the awesome website?
It’s the control freaks, of course, but not necessarily because they have undiagnosed OCD. They’re the ones that care about how I’m crafting their online reputation. They’re the ones that argue with me about their sites.
It’s not that I purposefully don’t try as hard for the lackadaisical clients. I try to build everyone the best website possible—but the client’s business is not my business. I can’t possibly know their businesses like they do.
It’s the same with you and the middle-men with which you choose to associate. Every time you join an organization, get a new client, or start a new job, you’re handing over the keys to a little piece of your personal reputation.
Sometimes it’s not such a big deal. Sometimes it is. Either way, it’s your butt on the line when interlopers muddle your own personal brand.
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The blogosphere is flush with discussion of Katy Perry’s hit single, “I Kissed a Girl.”
Here’s the vid, in case you’ve been living under a rock, or I dunno, listening to actual grown-up music:
As soon as the song hit the airwaves, politically correct homos everywhere cried “Homophobia!”
The offending lyrics seem to suggest that girl-on-girl kissing is “not what good girls do.”
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong
It felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight…
It’s not what
Good girls do
Not how they should behave
My head gets
So confused
Hard to obey
Silly me, at first I thought the whole cheating-on-your-boyfriend bit was what Katy meant by “not how they should behave.” I didn’t think she was commenting on homosexuality itself.
But one of her other songs is called “Ur So Gay,” about her hated ex-boyfriend. The case against Ms. Perry doesn’t look very good.
I’ve seen different reactions from other gay bloggers.
The New Gay interviewed Ms. Perry about her songs “I Kissed a Girl” and “Ur So Gay.” Turns out she hasn’t kissed a girl. She just sings about it. She’s flirting with the idea of flirting with lesbianism:
The New Gay: Have you ever actually kissed a girl?
Katy Perry: I think I will, I’m holding out for Megan Fox.
The New Gay: So you haven’t actually kissed a girl. Then the whole song is a fantasy?
Katy Perry: Yeah, it’s fantasy, it’s a song about curiosity.
MSNBC then commented on the New Gay interview in article about Katy Perry’s homophobic hits:
The New Gay conducted a confrontational interview that had a rattled Perry actually say, “My closest friends happen to be gay.” She wasn’t being ironic. Celebrity blogger Mollygood pointed out Perry comes from a religious upbringing (she used to record Christian music as Katy Hudson) and in her New Gay interview, Perry talks about how in her “strict, suppressed household,” homosexuality was considered “wrong.” But as Mollygood also says, that’s not so far removed from the message she’s sending with her hit songs, whether she realizes it or not.
But others aren’t so quick to hate on Katy. Fannie of “Ask Fannie” and Below the Belt fame thinks maybe the fact that a song about girls kissing girls hit #1 in the U.S. signifies how we’ve come:
Now, I will be the first to be critical of Perry’s brazen capitalization of queer women’s identities and lives for her own personal gain, and without getting truly lumped with any of those pesky social disadvantages to actually being queer, like homophobia and discrimination. Perry carefully navigates the subtle line between queer transgression and pandering to heterosexual male voyeurism which I have always found oddly aroused by gratuitous displays of lesbianism. However, for all her vices, could Perry’s one-hit-lesbo-wonder be a benchmark in queer inclusion in popular culture?
I’m torn. I want to believe that Katy Perry was just ignorant, not purposefully homophobic. But she’s got the backing of a major music label… Surely their P.R. department sent her a memo… “Hey Katy, Your songs are full of hate. LYLAS! XOXO!”
What do you think? Katy Perry—neo-conservative undercover operative on mission to spread hate—or pretty white girl who doesn’t know any better and wants to make a lot of money?
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Here’s your hump-day pick-me-up as I run out the door to go to work.
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It’s been a pretty stressful week at work.
A few weeks ago I finally was handed the reins to a pretty complicated project, but it’s not been going well. I didn’t manage client expectations as well as I should (read: saying, “No!”). There were also unforeseen glitches in the coding process that caused multiple deadlines to be pushed back.
After delivering some bad news over the phone to the client today (”No, you cannot use data from a year ago if it was not ever collected in the first place”), I told her I’d check with the technical team to try to find a solution and get back to her first thing tomorrow morning.
Two minutes later, I heard the phone ring in my boss’s office. Unhappy with the answer I had given her, she decided to go over my head, of course. Unfortunately for the client, I had given her the correct answer.
Even so, I felt stressed about the whole situation. I had hoped to exceed everyone’s expectations on this project. I envisioned happy clients, happy users, and a cheerful developer or two. Instead, I’ve got an anxious client, cranky developers, and who knows what the users are going to think.
I left the office a little after 6pm, feeling very stressed and moody. All I wanted was to crank up the AC, curl up under a blanket, and devastate a 9,000ish calorie Chipotle burrito with side of chips and guacamole.
But during the middle of my commute—blasting Rihanna’s Disturbia with the top down, because I do not care what the other suburban yuppies think of my taste in music—I had a moment of enlightenment.
I needed to rechannel my pent-up frustration. Eating that tortilla-wrapped flavor-explosion-chode would make me feel guilty. Stress eating burritos solves nothing. It only perpetuates the cycle of negativity.
So instead, I changed course. I went to the gym, where I eye-fucked a thirty-something personal trainer and an extremely tan twentysomething who might have been gay or European. Afterward, I hopped over to Whole Foods to buy $30 worth of fresh organic cherries because they’re delicious and in-season and healthy and seize-the-day yada yada yada… By the time I got home, I felt 100% better.
…
When I started writing this post, I think I meant to come to some conclusion about how you can turn around your anxious energy to make it work for you instead of against you.
But instead I think that maybe the lesson here is that when you’re in a bad mood, you’ll feel better if you do something slutty and expensive.
[Ed's note: Alternative title for this blog post was 'Putting the Ho in Whole Foods.']
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The Washington Business Journal reported a few days ago on the mass exodus of gays from the Dupont Circle neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Anecdotally, that sounds about right. The young gays all want to live around Town and Nelly’s Sports Bar.
Cobalt and JR’s are for the old-school gays.
And one or two of us live in the McMansion suburbs of Fairfax County, for reasons not even entirely clear to ourselves.
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Amazing! There’s an iPod/iPhone app for blogging with Wordpress.
Now if only I could type on it faster than 15 words per minute…
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Quick update:
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I’m having terrible luck trying to find the used-car of my dreams. Last week a car was bought out from under me, but this week the theme has been deluded Craigslist people who think their used convertibles are worth thousands over Kelley Blue Book value and Edmunds True Market Value.
Naive little me thought that maybe they simply weren’t aware that their asking prices were unreasonable, so I emailed them PDF versions of the Kelley Blue Book appraisal… silly me. Didn’t I know that these cars were special and therefore exempt from the rules-of-supply and demand?
So, gentle readers, it seems like I could wait around 3 more months for the perfect car to be listed on Craigslist and hope for a reasonable asking price… or I could take drastic measures.
One thing I noticed whilst performing searches on Cars.com with an ever-expanding geographic radius is that convertibles are more plentiful in sunny, warm states like California and Florida (duh). Because they’re more common (supply-and-demand, yada yada), those sunny-state convertibles are much cheaper than the same model in the D.C. / Virginia region.
A quick email to a Californian dealership confirmed that any car can be shipped to the East Coast for about $1,000, and I’d imagine it’d be less for shorter distances.
Now the question is this, gentle readers: Assuming I can save maybe $3,000 by getting a car from California and assuming that shipping will cost about $1,0000, is it worth it? Is a net $2,000 discount worth buying a car sight-unseen?
Do you know someone who’s ever bought a used car online?
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