Because every blogger’s opinion about the world at large is valued and unique, I have decided to weigh in on some of the day’s top controversies. By doing this I hope to prove that I am a woman of broad social engagement. A political being who won’t be silenced. A tastemaking culture vulture whom other people turn to when they want to know how to think about things.
The World Cup
I’m totally for it. What began eight years ago as my excuse for day-drinking has now blossomed into an aggressive spectator sport that has me rooting for any number of obscure, rowdy nations that somehow manage to exist outside of America’s borders. But as much as I enjoy learning about the soccer players’ family backgrounds and signature hairstyles, every once in while, because I am a refined and cosmopolitan person, I vaguely wonder what’s going on within the homelands of these athletes, and where those homelands reside on a map. So it would be helpful to me if this information could be printed somewhere on the team’s jerseys. The players can still keep their numbers and their names (as long as those names aren’t interminably Greek or Russian), but the jerseys should also incorporate a news headline or two from the originating country, and maybe a diagram so I can tell how far that country is from America.
Student debt
I have very few friends who aren’t at least $100,000 in debt. I write that, and I’m shocked. Shocked. What am I doing hanging out with such impecunious people? From now on I’m only fraternizing with peers who never made it past the eighth grade, so they can buy all my drinks.
Sexism
This bizarre and hurtful essay came to my attention last night as I was trying to decide which of my poorer friends to de-friend on Facebook. As far as I can tell, Ed Champion (a popular literary blogger known for being persnickety) had a playground crush on Emily Gould (a writer and Gawker gossip alum), which Emily never reciprocated, so Ed stole all the Number 2 pencils from Emily’s classroom desk and then stabbed her with them a million times. Then he had a mental break and got sent to reform school. If Ed’s rant (and I was almost with him until the third paragraph) hadn’t been written in misogynistic earnest and didn’t involve real people and was included in a first-person novel about a narcissistic boy who never grew up or learned how to use English properly, then I would be thoroughly entertained. But the whole thing made me want to protect a difficult woman’s vagina, and that is a weird place for me to be. I will continue to relish literary eviscerations, but they shouldn’t be so ad hominem that every female writer in America feels the need to rally around the victim. That is just too many voices, and we all know there can only be one authoritative voice in random cultural affairs—my own.
Racism
How can Ta-Nehisi Coates allege that racism still exists in America when every once in a while we white people look up from our gimlets of Grey Goose to the martini bar’s high definition television set and cheer on a BLACK man in an uninformative soccer jersey? How?!
Income inequality
This one really bothers me because yesterday I discovered that my roommate has an entire BOWL full of dimes and quarters in her bedroom while I could not come up with ten cents to help my boyfriend buy a loosie cigarette from the bodega downstairs. I even looked under the couch cushions because in movies these often conceal a great wealth. I am okay with my roommate having more change than I do, but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to know that some people in the world have their pockets bursting with coinage while I have to scrounge around in filth so I can buy a soda. Hey rich person, you were in the right place at the right time to beat the slot machine, so just take your winnings and go. But if you stay, and you want to live on this great green earth with the rest of us (or potentially share my microwave), then at least scatter some pennies under the couch cushions from time to time so we can keep the bodega in business.
The oceans
Say goodbye to the whales, everybody. I would not be surprised to find out that an early version of man existed around the time of the dinosaurs but we kept putting poison in their food and water dishes again and again until we killed them off and sterilized their babies and then we were all butt-hurt because the dinosaurs didn’t share our superior survival skills and then a meteor came and wiped us out because we suck.
Iraq
I’m not afraid to tackle the hard stuff. At heart (when they haven’t been exploded), terrorists are miserable, desperate people. Let’s find out why they are so miserable and desperate so those conditions can be addressed. Maybe they can all play in a soccer tournament with their grievances stitched onto their jerseys. I would definitely watch those games on TV. But from a bar in a well-off, gentrified neighborhood. Not in person because that would be terrifying.
Watermelon
Still delicious.
Kesha
She is probably going to be okay.
My time being the wise and lucid spokesperson of a generation
Up.