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Pamela Redmond Satran thinks I’m old. According to her blog, How Not To Act Old, and her bestselling book of the same title (which got a shout out today on Fox’s Good Day New York), even older people who manage to look young, betray their real age by acting old.
Some of Satran’s tell-tale signs that I'm long in the tooth: Do I like burgers and beers? Yes. Do I want to keep some things to myself? Yup. Did I cry for Susan Boyle? Teared up. Do I hate the stars of High School Musical 3 on principle? Certainly. Am I afraid of dying? Um, who isn't? Am I afraid of Twitter? Terrified. Do I prefer direct confrontation? Sure do. Do I like to make plans? Love to. I also listen to Bruce Springsteen, live in Greenwich Village, and I’m a bossy, cynical, chicken who enjoys dinner parties (where I will sometimes discuss things as embarrassing as digestion). I even, on occasion, bash men.
My real age, as measured in things more concrete than Satran's index: 25. (OK, almost 26.) But, by Satran’s standards, is anyone over the age of 15 not already over the hill? And are her rules actually a reflection of societal standards of youth, or just a good way to get on TV?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Say you have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, when you get a call telling you the meeting's been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting scheduled for now? Your response may reveal whether you're an "angry" person or a passive one.
It probably says a lot about me that I didn't even realize there could be two answers to this question. Obviously, I thought, the meeting was now scheduled for Friday. How could anyone say, as some apparently did, that it was Monday? Idiots. But apparently, the more passive (which could be put more kindly as "less confrontational") you are, the more likely you are to see time as passing you by, in which case a meeting that is moved "forward" will occur earlier. In this case, on Monday. If you see yourself as moving through time, moving the meeting "forward" puts it farther away—on Friday.
And according to this recent study, people who see themselves as moving through time tend to have "angrier temperaments." The truth is, it took me a couple of reads to manage to reinterpret "moved forward" as possibly meaning a Monday meeting. (It helps to think of the meeting as moving physically around on a calendar.) It felt like the exercise where you either see two faces or two vases. Apparently, I have issues. You?
Photograph by Getty Images.
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Molly Ringwald's heartfelt farewell to John Hughes in the New York Times today makes a good companion piece to the blog post "Sincerely, John Hughes" that we wrote about last week. Whereas Alison Byrne Fields was a teenager who loved Hughes from afar, Ringwald was a teenager who loved him up close.
Unsurprisingly, given their intimacy, Ringwald's memories have a darker, more nuanced cast than Fields'. She describes Hughes, the director who "catapulted [her] from obscurity and planted [her] in the American consciousness," as a kind of Peter Pan who refused to grow up—and who resented her when she decided to. Ringwald hadn't spoken to Hughes for more than 20 years when he died; their relationship soured when she decided to work with other directors. "I wanted to grow up," she writes, "something I felt (rightly or wrongly) I couldn’t do while working with John."
Luckily, the two had a moment of reconciliation (thanks to François Truffaut, natch), though I can't help but be saddened by the thought that the two didn't stay friends. (She did, however, stay close with Anthony Michael Hall, which is a big relief.)
The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a taste:
Most everyone knows that John retreated from Hollywood and became a sort of J.D. Salinger for Generation X. But really, sometime before then, he had retreated from us and from the kinds of movies that he had made with us. I still believe that the Hughes films of which both [Anthony Michael Hall] and I were a part (specifically “Sixteen Candles” and “The Breakfast Club”) were the most deeply personal expressions of John’s. In retrospect, I feel that we were sort of avatars for him, acting out the different parts of his life—improving upon it, perhaps. In those movies, he always got the last word. He always got the girl.
None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up ... your heart dies.”
Photograph of Molly Ringwald by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI.
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The latest issue of The New Yorker is full of myth busting, and the targets are two cherished classics of children's literature. Malcolm Gladwell argues that Atticus Finch, star father and lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, is not a brave reformer, but an accomodationist. Finch represents a black man in court, but he waves away the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. And to get his client, Tom Robinson, off the hook when he is charged falsely with rape, Finch traffics in base accusation's against the female accuser. He makes her out to be sex-starved white trash. Gladwell points out that Finch encourages the jurors "to swap one of their prejudices for another."
Meanwhile, Judith Thurman surveys the many histories of the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder that her beloved fictionalized Little House series has spawned. She reports that Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter and sometimes ghost writer, was a kind of "founding mother" of libertarianism along with Ayn Rand. Thurman frames the formidable self-reliance of the Ingalls and the Wilders—combating a plague of locusts and twisting hay into fuel for a fire—as deeply conservative and anti-government. Rose wished for the death of FDR. Her parents opposed New Deal legislation directed at farmers and at one point her father, Almanzo, threatened an agent of the Agriculture Department off his farm with a shotgun. Laura told a Republican congressman in 1943, "What we accomplished was without help of any kind, from anyone." This, of course, is not true, as Thurman points out. But I love the wrenches that she and Gladwell throw into our reading of these books. You know you're hooked when you care as much about the politics of a fictional character as about anyone real.
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Noreen, you make a good point about Sec. Clinton’s reaction to a Congolese man who asked her about Bill Clinton's thoughts on a potential loan from China to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet I’m hard pressed to believe that many people in the Washington cocktail set would be so impolitic, or clueless, to exhibit anything remotely close to such condescension and sexism. After watching her campaign for the presidency last year, is there really any one left in the U.S. who doesn’t believe she can hold her own on weighty matters?
I was not the least bit bothered by Hillary Clinton’s tone or reaction (whew, was she angry), though I bet after watching herself on YouTube she might wish she had come off a bit more diplomatically. And I don’t care if the original question was supposedly flubbed by the Congolese translator, who was a woman by the way. Clearly either the questioner or the translator mistakenly thought that Bill was the real brain behind Hillary and that his opinion on policy matters was more important than hers. Unfortunately this kind of attitude is common among African, Latin American, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and South Asian men (and all the others I’ve left out), especially those in positions of power. What’s sadder is that many women in these regions have become so accustomed to such thinking that they believe it to be true as well.
Sometimes a well-timed and undiplomatic tongue-lashing is called for to make patriarchal politicans think twice before speaking, or at least remind them that sometimes it’s better to bite their stupid, sexist tongues. It’s also a good example for women who live in these patriarchal societies that they don’t have to stand for such outdated cultural notions. Hillary’s comments were a very effective verbal kick-in-the-butt response to a very offensive foot-in-the-mouth question. I say, “You go girl!”
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