Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Random and assorted, plus advice!

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Several very large, very polite men from Jack Trux Moving are taking everything out of my current house and loading it on to a couple of trucks, which will then take it all to the new house, where we will live where the current house gets demolished inside and rebuilt. This is a very exciting, very nerve-wracking process. Nonetheless, Darin and I manage to be quite cheery about it. I don’t know whether this is optimism, stupidity, or just simple naivete. Seems to have worked out okay so far.

Darin took the kids to see Ponyo, in order to get them out of the house for this part. I have chosen to remain behind, both to answer questions (since I’ve already decided where everything’s going in the new house and the floor plan exists only in my head) and to do laundry. Because like death and taxes, there is always laundry.

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I have new goals in life:

  • To have laundry minions, who will just take care of the laundry for me, dammit, day in and day out. I know laundry isn’t the greatest trauma in the world, but it’s such a pain in the ass.
  • Next year, I want to do the world’s most perfect move: walk out the door of one place, walk in the door of the next. No movers, no boxes, no unpacking, no tsuris. All new stuff waiting for us at the end; leave the doors open on the old place for looters, et al. Darin has said that if I can figure out how to do it for our move back to this house, he is all for it.

I didn’t say they were important goals.

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I’ve been hanging out a lot at my favorite fashion forum, only not in the fashion areas, but in the chat-about-life areas. Many (though by no means all) of the posters on the forum are young women in their early 20s, and God help me, I want to shake them so badly. I know, there are certain truths you can only learn for yourself, and people can tell you this stuff over and over and you won’t grok it until you get it for yourself.

But if I could get a few things through to these women (and, by extension, to 20-year-old me), I would say:

  • You are all you have. Anything more than that you have access to (family, friends, money, living situation): awesome. But in the end, you are all you got. Act accordingly and treat yourself like the special, important person you are.

    Important corollary: you are all you need, too. Which is convenient and cuts down on the number of things you need to stuff in your bags.

  • Not everybody’s going to like you. There’s no magic formula of niceness or agreeability that will make you popular. In fact, the popular people are the ones with strong convictions, who go ahead and do what they want no matter what you think.

    The trick is, You have to actually not care what other people think about every damn thing you do. Conveniently, this turns out to be much, much easier than we were led to believe as children.

  • Don’t wait. Ever. For anything or anyone. You don’t get extra points for being the patient, uncomplaining one. In fact, you’re probably going to get stepped on for your troubles. The person you are waiting for is not going to wake up one day and go, “Oh gosh, that person who’s just been so accommodating—she’s the one!” Your boss is not going to say, “Hmmm, who’s the best worker, the one who never says anything or the one who tells me in detail about their weekly accomplishments and is vocal about taking on new responsibilities?” The whole Discovering-Cinderella shtick wasn’t true back then and it ain’t true now.

    When I was investigating agents to query, I was amazed at the number of people who focused on the one agent they wanted and they were just going to wait forever for the response from that person. My advice was always: Move on. If they want you, they’ll get back to you. In the meantime, check out who else is out there. Which brings me to…

  • Make them (boy, job, whatever) reject you. Don’t decide ahead of time you’re not going to get it. Ask for it, and make them say No. Yes, rejection hurts. So, somebody doesn’t like you. Here’s your mantra: NEXT. That one didn’t work out? NEXT.

    A young woman I know got a callback for a role in a Harry Potter film…and decided she wasn’t going to get it, so she didn’t even go. I want to shake her! But what’s done is done. And I’m not so sure that the universe is going to make that offer too many more times. (Yes, I’m anthropomorphizing the universe. You’d be surprised how well that actually works.)

  • Just say what you want. No demands, no threats. It’s a simple formula: “I want such-and-so, and I will not accept anything less.” If you get something less, honor your commitment to yourself and leave. That’s it. This bargaining skill works with everything: lovers, jobs, children.

    For example, many people have noted that we have good communication skills with our kids: we tell them what we expect of them, and we tell them what’s going to happen if they don’t live up to it. This doesn’t stop me from yelling…but generally the yelling happens when I wasn’t clear enough before hand, so: my bad. (And when I get a hold of myself, I apologize to the kids for my behavior.)

  • The guy he is right now is the guy he’s going to be forever, unless he decides to change. Deal with the person in front of you, not the person you want him to be.

    If I read one more goddamn romance (or bulletin board thread) where the object is to transform the bad boy through the magic of the (patient, understanding, loitering) woman’s love, I’m going to vomit. Remember that line from As Good As It Gets where Jack Nicholson says, “You make me want to be a better man”? The only response to that is, “Then go ahead and work on that, and right now I’m going to go out and find someone who’s already there.”

  • It really is better to be alone than in bad company. The nice thing is, there are so many good people out there to be with!
  • Stop worrying so damn much about how you look. You’re never going to look prettier than you do right now. And pretty/fashionable/anorexic has nothing to do with how attractive you are or how much you get laid. We have all known size Whatever women who could attract anyone they want, because they like themselves no matter what. Is it more fun to be with someone who likes herself, or one who’s criticizing herself all the time?
  • Yes, if you stand up for yourself and what you want, you’re probably going to lose some friends. Conveniently, this will weed out which of your friends aren’t really your friends, which we can only regard as a BONUS!

Mind you, I’ve learned every single one of these the hard way, and many of them I have to keep telling myself, over and over, day in and day out. But when I’m using them, I feel so much more powerful and in control and every day life is just so much more enjoyable!

Nail polish

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About a year ago, when I started to lose weight, I became very interested in how I looked, both in terms of my clothes and my accessories. I wore belts infrequently before a year ago, because I always wore jeans that didn’t need them. They didn’t need them because I was wearing what my friend Nina lovingly referred to as “mom jeans”: high-waisted, unflattering jeans I wouldn’t be caught dead in today. Of course, when you move to medium-waisted or low-waisted jeans, you discover why everyone keeps talking about “muffin top” and why you need a belt for your jeans.

Another thing I started doing was taking care of my nails. I’ve bitten my nails for years. And I started saying, No, I’m going to take care of my hands, so they look nice. This hasn’t been 100%—this week, in fact, I’ve had a hell of a time keeping the stresses of trying to get the house in order off of my nails. But for the most part, over the past year I’ve had very nice nails.

My first point of order a year ago was to buy more of my favorite nail polish, MAC Vino. Alas! MAC no longer made this shade. So I dived headfirst into what was available, trying to find a duplicate. From there, I branched out into brighter reds. Then pinks. Then purples. Then I went nuts and hit my favorite shade, a dark purple/grey named OPI My Private Jet.

While looking for all of these faboo nail polishes, I made quite a collection.

My nail polish collection

And now they all have to stay here until I find a place for them in the new house. Alas.

Modern terms for women

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This recent entry by Justine Musk reminded me of the not-especially-novel realization that words to describe women in a derogatory way are a)commonplace, b)much meaner than any similar terms used to describe men, and c)often used as shorthand for, as Musk puts it, “nuts and sluts.”

And I was reminded of the whole “nuts and sluts” defense (although to be fair, this poster left out any suggestion that I was running around having affairs while taking a break from my golddigging, which is a bit surprising when you think about it because clearly I had the time, since the kids are so rarely with me….). When you try to tear down a woman you call her: selfish, spoiled/ungrateful, crazy, golddigging, bad mother, slut, whore, fat, ugly. Because these are the worst things a woman can possibly be (which means she’s supposed to be: selfless, sacrificing, chaste, thin, beautiful, pleasing, and of course ‘sane’, which I suspect often translates to ‘not causing any trouble or inconvenience’, and unspoiled/grateful, ie: ‘lacking any bothersome sense of entitlement’). What is the equivalent for a man? Is there one?

There are no equivalent terms for men. Calling a man a “bastard” or “asshole” is not the same thing as calling a woman a “bitch” or a “whore”—you know the old line: “Men are assertive, women are aggressive bitches.”

(My favorite definition of “whore” or “slut” is “Someone who’s had sex with one more person than I have.” It makes me giggle every time I hear someone use one of those words. Which is good, because it keeps me from slapping them across the face.)

In direct reflection of assertive/bitch: Where a woman is “pleasing” or “friendly,” a man is probably just a “pansy.” Or an even worse p-word (which is, of course, in and of itself a derogatory word meaning woman)? Does anyone really think calling someone a “dick” is the same thing as calling them a “pussy” or a “cunt”? And are those insults have the same impact on men and women alike, or are they considered a greater insult to one sex over the other?

There is no plot to The Devil Wears Prada if the protagonist’s boss is a male instead of a female. The entire plot of the movie is: The female boss doesn’t try to make friends with her underling; instead, she treats her underling…like an underling! And expects the underling to do her fucking job without needing a pat on the head! SHOCK! Was it even possible to relate to Anne Hathaway’s character’s sense of entitlement and resentment? Grow the fuck up, honey, and do it NOW.

One of the knocks on Sandra Bullock’s character in The Proposal is that she doesn’t say “Hi” to the secretary as she goes into the Big Boss’s office. Wouldn’t it be considered weird if Important Executive Christian Bale stopped to say “Hi” to the secretary simply to be friendly (instead of, say, to get her phone number for a quickie or to insinuate himself for some corporate espionage later)? He’d be considered completely unserious management material if he stopped to say “Hi” to every goddamn secretary he ran across.

(Don’t even get me started on how The Proposal decides to humanize Sandra Bullock by having her confess that after a fellow executive insulted her, she fired him…and then went into the bathroom to cry, because her widdle feelings got hurt!)

I know there have been female attempts to reclaim the word “bitch”, but I think they’re not as successful as the gay community’s reclamation of “queer,” sadly. “Bitch” is still just pejorative.

It all comes down to: She’s not being nice. Let’s put her in her place.

You know what? Not everyone likes you. They’re going to call you “bitch” and “ballbuster” and “whore” and whatever else behind your back anyhow. Fuck ’em. But don’t use any of those words in response.

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Ten years ago, during the whole Monica Lewinsky nonsense, I received mail from my high school addressed to “Miss Diane Patterson.” My exclusive all-girls Catholic high school, which had always drilled into me the importance of relying on myself, which assumed I was going to college and not going off to get married immediately, which had always placed the emphasis on seeing me as the most important person in my life…was referring to me as “Miss.”

I wrote a letter to the school’s principal, who had also been one of my teachers while I was there, and said, “Could you add a form of address to your database that doesn’t rely on my relationship to a man?”

I am happy to report every mailing I’ve gotten since has been to “Ms. Diane Patterson,” if not just “Diane Patterson.”

There is no excuse for using the term “Miss” for a woman over 18. I’m sorry, there just isn’t. My marital status is none of your damn business; if you need to know, you can ask. It’s not more polite, it’s not better etiquette, it’s just a way of filing a woman into the “available” category.

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A year ago I was lying around the pool at Club Swanky, envying the mothers walking by who were wearing bikinis, whereas I felt like a big fat slug. The terms “MILF” and “trophy wives” came to mind, and I immediately found myself asking:

“Who’s the ‘I’ in that term”

and

“Whose trophy, precisely?”

Then there’s my new favorite term: “cougar.” Which leads us to the question: “Too old for sex with WHOM?”

These are all words describing a woman solely in terms of her relationship to a man—and simply a sexual relationship at that. Who does she belong to? Whose life is she improving simply by existing? Who is she too old for? There’s nothing about her qualities, what makes her an individual, anything about her experiences or hopes and dreams… Nope, it’s all about who she’s servicing sexually.

If you use them, please stop. You’re just promoting the idea that women are nothing more than plastic play dolls, serving the same purpose and as interchangeable.

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Man, you’d think something had happened to me recently to bring this rant on. Actually, things are really great—stressful, with the upcoming move and all, but overall fine.