WWPD Guides: How you know it's time to go to the supermarket

I used to enjoy food-shopping. Or not exactly used to - I did for the fleeting moment that it went something like this. Now that it involves the terribly exciting choice between driving to Wegmans or Whole Foods, there's none of that 'see what looks good at the market.' There's planning. Or there should be planning. I did not plan.

And so, the official WWPD guide to knowing when to grocery-shop:

-You smell the milk, can tell it's gone off, very off, but wonder what that says about buckwheat crepe batter made with that same milk a couple days prior. Upon discovering that the batter smells more like buckwheat than milk, you figure the batter is probably fine, and gets cooked anyway, so. That you continue to feel fine more than 12 hours after the might I say rather Breton breakfast in question may leave you vindicated, but may pose a problem tomorrow morning, when you want milk for your rather American mass-produced dry cereal.

-You find yourself thinking not in terms of meals, but in terms of bits and pieces that could possibly go together on pasta.

-You think of those "sauces" much-vaunted for their authentic Italian simplicity. The one that's just black pepper, parmesan (still a bit of that!, and if you point out that it's meant to be pecorino, you've missed the essence of this post) and pasta water, or that other that's just olive oil and garlic (haven't run out!).

-Or you find yourself trying to build a meal around a single mid-size artichoke. (For the third consecutive night - it was a container with three.) All the hot new farm-to-tables are taking a showcase-the-vegetable approach. Who's to say your apartment isn't a farm-to-table (the ingredients must have come from farms, and you do have a table)?

-Despite knowing full well that the kale you bought with such good intentions at least a month ago hasn't held up, you start guiltily trying to build meals around the kale. But not trying so hard that you actually remove the decaying kale from the fridge and consume whichever parts of it still look decent.

-You're out of jam. Jam! (WWPD finds the science behind giving up refined sugar convincing, but savory pancakes just aren't the same. Not that there weren't other problems with this morning's pancake.)

-You hear a podcast about beer-battered fish tacos and realize that while you do have beer, you don't have fish or tacos.

"Princeton" dining guide UPDATED

Living in the woods has turned me into a far better cook than I'd have thought possible. Or at least more varied. Croissants! Sushi! Agedashi tofu! Pizza! And so much more. This is because my first year living here, without a car, the only possible restaurants were the ones in town, which tend to be places to take one's business clients - $50 a person for something bland. Relatively cheap, relatively flavor-having food seemed out-of-reach unless homemade.

A car changes everything. Once you go a bit further afield than the bike will readily allow, things improve. I'm including Philadelphia but not New York, because of the time, tolls, and NJ Transit required for the latter, and you have to draw the line somewhere.

Been, will be back:

-In Princeton itself: Stick with Ajihei (sushi), both coffee shops (Small World and Rojo's - the latter may have better coffee, but the former has seats/people-watching), and Terra Momo or whatever the bakery on Witherspoon is called these days. Also: Thursday farmers' market in season. Cheese from Despaña. Mozzarella from D'Angelo's. Bent Spoon for ice cream.

-Near Junction: Shanghai Bun. Closed Tuesdays, which is easy to forget.

-Nomad. Pizza in Hopewell, which is basically Greater Princeton. Since figuring out pizza at home, I've had less incentive to go, but it's there and it's excellent.

-Chung Sol Bat. Korean barbecue in Edison. Expensive and not especially vegetarian-friendly, but a good splurge for omnivores.

-Paris Baguette and H-Mart. French-Korean bakery (get the milk bread and cannelles) and Korean supermarket, respectively, in the same Edison strip mall. Combine the two if possible. And don't go late at night (which I almost always end up doing), or you'll miss the fish-market part.

-Pad Thai in Highland Park, Siam in Lambertville, Thai restaurants. I generally prefer the latter, but opinions differ. And it's mostly a question of which direction you want to go in.

-Shake Shack, Philadelphia. It's Shake Shack - fast food with a nod to quality.

-Spread Bagelry. Montreal bagels in Philadephia. Given the absence of even Northeastern U.S. bagels in Princeton, you may want to pick up a few.

-Nam Phuong. Vietnamese food is better in Philadelphia than NYC. This will prove it.

-Artisan Boulanger Patissier. As are croissants.

To-try:

-Chaikhana Uzbekistan. In Philadelphia, but some part of outer Philadelphia that's apparently about a half-hour from where I live. The area also has Moldovan food, which I don't believe I've ever tried.

UPDATE

Uzbek mission accomplished. While this was not my first encounter with Bukharian cuisine, according to WWPD records, my last was in 2006, so it had been a while. This time, no explicit material flashed on the screen - just a musical variety show. It's a funny cuisine for me, I suppose, because it's on the one hand ever so exotic (Central Asia!) and on the other, something very close to my own ancestral cuisine. Is because these are Central Asian Jewish restaurants, or would there be significant Ashkenazi/Eastern European/Central Asian overlap regardless? Manti and kreplach taste just about the same - a bland, oniony meat dumpling you (apparently!) need to have grown up with to appreciate. In any case, I enjoyed it. Although I wouldn't recommend it to anyone averse to meat dishes listing unspecified "meat" as the principle ingredient. As the DVD playing on the giant TV screen suggests, this is not a know-where-your-food-comes-from cultural environment.

/UPDATE

-Izumi. Japanese food in Philadelphia, inevitably closed whenever I'm in that area.

-Suggestions welcome.

WWPD Guides: social media and shaming

Another day, another online-idiocy-and-shaming debacle. This time, though, it's not a private action made public, it seems, but a public posting made, err, extra-public?

So, so, so many thoughts on this, but a few scattered ones, before I forget...

-When is stupidity fair game for online mockery? It depends: Who was the intended/plausible audience of whichever act/post?

There's a spectrum, from a private incident observed or private conversation had, to a mass email/Facebook post, to a tweet or blog post, to an article in a small online publication, to a big one, to one of the ones whose very purpose is making things go viral. Someone's fussing about a latte being with the wrong amount of foam? Yes, that's annoying for the barista, not to mention for you, the person waiting in line behind Mr./Ms. Fussy. If you feel compelled to share this on social media - and why not, if you can convey it in a clever way - by all means, do so... in text. Don't post a photo of this person, as if they're America's Most Wanted. Don't launch some campaign to identify this person, their place of work, etc. And so on. Very obviously public-audience-intended means a far lower threshold for what can be made fun of in an identifiable way.

-What's the purpose of the mockery? Is it genuine anger that someone could be so racist/sexist/etc.? Is any of it a dare I say a performance of indignation, a fear that if one doesn't register one's disapproval, one will lose one's post as Sensitive Person on whichever social-media platform? Is what's being mocked innocent stupidity and not racist/sexist/etc.? There's something to be said for shaming truly awful behavior, behavior that nevertheless falls short of what even a non-libertarian such as myself would oughta-be-a-law. But people just being kind of unpleasant? Shame the unpleasantness in a way that doesn't shame the person. If you must do the latter to do the former, do neither.

-Is the object of your fury a famous person? We're so accustomed to stories of celebrities and politicians gaffe-ing it up a storm, then it'll be like, oops, and then life goes on. The same redemption narrative may not go over so well for ordinary people who lose their jobs, reputations, and so forth when one mistake in an otherwise anonymous life becomes the thing they're known for. I think what happens is, once someone's incident, whatever it is, goes viral, they feel like a public figure to the people reading about the incident online. It just starts to feel like a story that's out there, and this person's name is already just so known by the time you've arrived at it. But they're not actually famous, as in famous beyond this incident. It's a very different situation.

-What about the (inadvertent) shaming of people in your life? Oversharing about others brings up two separate privacy concerns: that of the person being discussed without consenting to this, and that of the person doing the sharing, who may imagine he or she is sharing with a far smaller audience than is the case. As such, overshare needs to be treated as something about which people need education, not as a self-evident wrong. This is something I've come to realize, having first addressed parental, then teacher, overshare. In both cases - and in others I've yet to hold forth about - someone will feel as if they're telling an anecdote from their own life that's of course theirs to share, when in fact... But the point shouldn't be to start shaming the oversharers. At least not before they've had a good explanation or several about why whichever type of sharing is excessive.

Again, what happens is, most of us know yet don't know what it means to say something to a lot of people. Typing a private email feels like typing a status update, which feels like typing something that will be emailed to an editor who will, in turn, post it before a huge audience. You never really get the presence of your audience, big or small, the way you would if in a big crowd. A funny thing happens, and the impulse is to share. It's what everyone else is doing, so it won't feel like a big deal. But an "overheard-in-NY"-type story is different from an overheard-in-my-nuclear-family one.

Kugel in the Midwest

Seth Kugel, the "Frugal Traveler," toured much of the Midwest and wrote about it. Quel chutzpah!, she exclaims, translating from the insufficiently provincially-cosmopolitan (but plenty angsty) comments.

New Yorkers - Kugel evidently grew up in the Boston area, but has long lived in NYC or abroad - are not supposed to comment on how they've found the Midwest. Anything negative comes across as snooty - what, is it somehow not civilization if an unmarked ramen and bespoke-cocktail lounge isn't on every corner? And anything positive comes across either as condescending ('oh look, how adorable, they still wear bootcut jeans!') or ignorant ('well what do you know, they do have espresso-based beverages outside of Greater Williamsburg!' or, if you really want to rile people up, 'so Chicago is a city!').

The third option - the one Kugel flirts with here - is to list the ways the Midwest is superior to New York. This is essentially the most generous, open-minded approach to any travel-writing, no matter where one is going or from. Be enthusiastic and excited about all the new things you're seeing and grateful for the chance! But because he's from New York, he pretty much can't win. He erred in not already knowing the Midwest well, because it seems as if he thinks he 'discovered' it, even if he simply discovered it for himself, and yes, for a readership that may not get out much. He erred in making it sound too appealing and uh oh what if coastal tourists follow suit.

Or maybe the error was in the framing - if sites in the Midwest were simply integrated into the Travel section, that might be less rage-provoking than a full-on 'look, we've checked that box' series. Although this was a series, not just the one piece, so, who knows.

Below, the official WWPD guide to being from but sometimes getting out of New York.

-It's not weird for New Yorkers to find small towns in the Midwest - or small towns, or much of the Midwest (Chicago, for a New Yorker, isn't all that strange) - strange, any more than the reverse is strange. Provincialism coming from urbanites isn't somehow the greater crime.

-If we define all interest in the Midwest on the part of New Yorkers as inherently patronizing and offensive, what then? Is it a better state of affairs if everyone stays ignorant? If NYC-based publications only cover the Marais and Williamsburg?

-Never ever once should it come up in one of these discussions that New York - or major cities, or major coastal cities - isn't really America. And yet, it inevitably does.

-Yes, gawking seems silly when one considers just how rustic life can be even within the Northeast. It can be tough to suss out what's special about the Midwest if the author finds anywhere with livestock or country roads to fit the bill. (Hey, I live in the Midwest - who knew? And commuted daily for one semester to Manhattan!) Kugel, to his credit, admits this failing, but the commenters still have at it.

-One way not to react to the Midwest is to fetishize it in racial terms. The bit at the end about the "blondes"* - as if blond hair, but only on the ladies, is some kind of amenity akin to "free and plentiful" parking spots - was a bit on the nauseating side, even if it's kinda-sorta redeemed by Kugel transgressively referring to all this blondness as "exotic.* I'd more often seen this approach to travel writing from those headed to Europe, like when a different author went to the Netherlands and advised a small town over Amsterdam, because it has fewer immigrants and more of the tall people one evidently goes to that country to get a look at.

*This sort of thing always makes me think of how, when I was headed to Chicago for college - to a school I'd picked in part because I did want to see more of the country and meet people from other regions - I had this twinge of concern, from having read Portnoy's Complaint at a formative age, that 'the Midwest' was a place where all the women looked like Claudia Schiffer. Needless to say...

WWPD Guides: OMG DRIVERS LICENSE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! edition

Prepare yourselves, WWPD readers, for what shall be the most momentous announcement of WWPD history: On this very day, I went and got a driver's license. It actually happened. After two failed road tests in Red Hook, after actually getting a car and practicing since June, after putting my husband through the unique agony that is teaching a loved one how to drive, after panicking just about continuously from the time I set up this road test, the day finally came, and I managed to not massively screw anything up. Yes, my foot was quivering on the brake, and yes, my shirt, if not the entirety of Mercer County, was drenched in sweat. But it's done! I'm so happy to never, ever, ever parallel park again. If this means not driving to Philadelphia, so be it.

So, now that that's out of the way, the official WWPD guide to getting a driver's license as an ancient person:

-The biggest obstacle to this ended up being my so-so proof of address (which turned out to be OK, long story), so I recommend holding onto recent first-class mail, in your current name, if you've changed it. Don't get tripped up by something you can totally control.

-Use lessons strategically. Learning to drive with lessons alone is theoretically possible, but it helps tremendously to get a feel for just basic maneuvering. To pay for this with lessons would get expensive rather quickly. But just practicing isn't ideal, either - you want, at the very least, to take a lesson right before the test. That way, someone who knows the local DMV gives you whichever tips, plus you've gotten over the most extreme nerves an hour or so before the test itself. The only downside is, the car will be unfamiliar. But if they're not too different (i.e. you hadn't been driving something closer to a truck), you'll be fine. Also useful: take a lesson where your instructor tells you you're ready, then practice for several months more, and only then take the test.

-Practice with someone who got a license somewhere with a much more difficult test than you're going to take. It helps to find a Belgian - their test is on normal roads, and using a manual. What you want to do, as with any test, is overshoot the mark in preparation. (I think my husband should be able to put 'taught badly-coordinated native-New-Yorker wife how to drive' on his CV. I think this counts as astrophysics.)

-With parallel parking, you will spend a lot of time perfecting the maneuver, but what you really need to know is how to correct for having entered the spot incorrectly. On my test, the parallel parking came immediately after a right turn, so there was no time to straighten out the car. I could tell how wrong the angle was, but figured once I was in the spot, using some combination of lesson-techniques and Belgian-driving ones, I'd get it in there. Which I did, but with a hubcap touching the curb. Which, with more time, I'd have corrected, but DMV examiners need to get on with the day.

-Pray for a lenient examiner. And I think this falls into Dan Savage's category of things atheists might make an exception and pray for.

-Re: psychology: one thing that can help or hurt, depending, is to remind yourself that everyone has taken this test and passed. This isn't like getting into college or grad school, or like getting any job whatsoever. This is open admissions, as it were. Remind yourself that you're not special, not uniquely incapable of doing this basic thing that everybody does. Unless you do have a condition that prevents you from driving safely, in which case don't drive. But if you're just run-of-the-mill clumsy, remember that this skill isn't the same as being good at sports or ballet. Don't assume that mediocre spacial reasoning, or a poor performance in high school physics, disqualifies you from the basic way Americans and many others get around.

WWPD Guides: complaining post-storm

Acceptable:

-Your home was damaged, but not altogether swept away by the storm.

-Your subway/train (or a viable alternative) continues to run, but your commute now takes twice as long and is twice as crowded.

-You have not had power/heat/hot water/Internet for a week or more, or for at least two days with no message re: when it's being restored. Assuming you have perspective, you're allowed to complain even if the electricity being off doesn't mean some machine that literally keeps you alive will stop working. Nor do you need to engage in Luddite romanticism about how great it is to sit by candlelight, or - horrors - how refrigeration is overrated. If anything, refrigeration isn't given its proper due. (Says the person who optimistically bought replacement ricotta, despite living somewhere where three raindrops means the power will go out.)

Unacceptable:

-Complaining about a loss of power in your home to anyone who'll pick up, from your cellphone, on an extra-crowded rush-hour NJ Transit train. Yes, dude behind me this morning, I'm talking about you. A shame that you've been without power, but guess what - by virtue of their presence on this train, they either are or until very recently were in your situation, or maybe worse.

-A momentary blackout lowered your inhibitions, causing you to OMG eat carbs.

-Your hair is a millimeter longer than you like it, and OMG your salon doesn't have power.

-You had to relocate to the Upper East Side, from SoHo, and uptown people are so square. I know, it's a pain to have to go to the Sephora on 86th Street rather than the one on lower Broadway, to the Barneys flagship rather than the Barneys Co-ops downtown. Uptown and downtown have been near-identical upscale malls (but with really good food, admittedly mostly downtown) since forever. Complain about relocation, but if you've relocated from SoHo or Tribeca, edgy you ain't.

-Your complaint, whatever it is, has been featured in the NYT Styles pages.

WWPD Guides: Beauty tips for the inept

Recently, I found that I'd developed the skin of, shall we say, a middle-school student. This is an area I'd been lucky in, for the most part, so I was a bit taken aback. Zits, now, at less than a year away from the big 3-0? On my nose, next to my nose, etc. I want to leave some mystery, so let's say you know what a face looks like, and they were in many locations. What could it be? Stress from the slow march towards the (gulp) job market? The ten-trillion-step commute? 

And then I stopped to look at the neat new body-wash I'd been using, purchased at the supermarket in Heidelberg because it came in cool packaging and smelled nice, but also because I was under the possibly mistaken impression that it's sold at Whole Foods for much more. (What's almost as good as buying something not available at home? Things like this, which give you the illusion of somehow making up for the cost of getting abroad in the first place.) Anyway, so the second ingredient in this soap-ish product is sesame oil. Like what I put on stir-fry. I had, for a few weeks, been rubbing sesame oil onto my face, and instead of soap, at that. And, although I first noticed this on the German ingredients, I soon saw that right below it were the English-language ingredients. There, in English, were the words "sesame" and "oil." 

Miracle of skin-care miracles, I stopped washing my face with sesame oil, and problem solved.

WWPD Guides: Beauty

Beauty - as in makeup, skin creams, and so on - is strangely compelling. But why? Is it just because relative to clothing, makeup is cheap, or is it more that one can more readily purchase a Chanel lipstick than a Chanel anything else? Is "beauty" - or "vanity" for that matter - for women thrilled with how they look, who want to spend as much time as possible gazing into a mirror, or for self-haters? Is Into the Gloss is actually a drug?

On some level, we all understand that how you look is for the most part a matter of your features, your age, and your overall well-being. If you don't look like this already, which I guarantee you don't, no revitalizing eye serum will make the difference. But wouldn't it be neat if, with the right selection of products, you could, at least on special occasions? It's now more possible than ever before to read about what various glamorous women goop onto themselves, and no matter how many times you repeat to yourself that correlation is not causation, you will wonder if maybe that Bioderma Créaline is all it's cracked up to be. You'll wonder this without even knowing what the product ostensibly does.

When it comes to beauty, there are two competing myths.  The first, the one promoted by the industry itself, is that products or procedures work miracles. The second is that beautification either does nothing (and is a plot to sell you stuff you don't need) or is in fact counterproductive. The liberation-from-beauty philosophy holds that if you stop blow-drying your hair, if you stop wearing concealer, this will make you not a frizzier, more blemished version of your usual, but will reveal once and for all your gorgeous natural hair texture and impeccable skin. When the truth is that sometimes, liberation might just mean accepting to look less conventionally attractive, and giving up whichever advantages that had provided.

So, onto the Official WWPD Guide, beauty edition. There are no hard-and-fast rules as to which forms of artifice are worth the bother, as this will depend on your own features, preferences, schedule, budget, and so on. But some general principles may help:

-There is a temptation to divide beautification rituals into self-hatred (bad) and self-expression (good). Yes to royal-blue eye shadow, say, but down with foundation. When what we should really do is separate out procedures that require general anesthesia, tens of thousands of dollars, risk of death, things of that nature, and have a separate conversation about those. When it comes to makeup, it's not always possible to say what's "fun" and what's "correction." For example, where does eyeliner fall? At what point does looking more awake become looking rock'n'roll? But as a rule, if the damage is $25 handed over to Sephora, this is relatively no big deal compared with $2,500 ($25,000?) handed over to someone who's cutting you open gratuitously. It's not that this removes ambiguity - where does Botox fall? chemical hair-straightening? - but it frames the discussion more productively.

-When it comes to deciding what you need/want to do, skin-care-wise, do not invent problems. There's this thing one reads about, "taking really good care of your skin," which evidently means purchasing thousands of dollars worth of serums. Isn't that some snazzy packaging? But try to resist. If the skin around your eyes is fine, you don't need eye cream. If your skin isn't dry, no moisturizer. Do you bathe regularly? Then skip the special "face wash" - you're presumably washing your face when you wash the rest of yourself, and if not, you're doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, if you have an actual dermatological condition, what you need is a dermatologist, not an equally expensive guessing game on a far-more-expensive trip to Frahnce.

-The big thing now in the beauty industry is "natural" products. As with organic food, it's a hippie interest gone mainstream. It's no longer about using one product as toothpaste, shampoo, and kitchen-cleaner, but the usual division of labor (one cream for the eyes, one for the neck...), minus whichever taboo ingredients, or with a leafy design. There will be an emphasis on "purity" - whether it refers to your health or the environment, subliminally it's all meant to stand in for the "purity" of your skin once whichever wrinkles or zits are removed. Leading to approaches like this: "[...] I got really scared of all the toxic things that are in beauty products. I mean, I smoke, I drink, I’m not a vegan, I eat like a French person, so pretty healthy, but with ice cream and candy."

While it's possible we are all being slowly killed by the butylacetoformadocyanides in our insufficiently organic eyeliner, the way to deal with that possibility isn't to collect a wide range of "natural" brands, but rather to simply use fewer products. Because let's be serious - do we have any idea if whatever replaces parabens is any better? Rather than scrutinizing the ingredients of what you do slather on, slather less stuff on. If you're wearing a toner and a serum and a primer and a day cream and invigorating oils and a tinted moisturizer and only after all that, you start applying your makeup, you may want to slow down. This will be better for your skin, your health, your wallet, and the environment, everything but the profits of the skin-cream industry. Your skin does not need to be "fed."

-That there is such a thing as marketing doesn't mean products never work as promised. I wanted to believe it, but no. Somewhere along the line, I tried this shampoo and conditioner, and realized my mistake. Oh, and if you're one of those pale women who gets a lot of 'you look tired', concealer and eyeliner, yes. Maybe blush, but don't overdo that. An absolutist stance against the Sephora Industrial Complex ends up being a bit self-defeating if you have some relatively contained routine without which you would look and feel worse.

-Mascara, however, is the single most overrated product. Yes, I have the drugstore Maybelline, and yes, out of some kind of ritual, I will wear it if I want to look my best. But if you have anything but pale blond lashes (and the product is of course marketed to women of all complexions), it's a bit like wearing foundation on unblemished skin - no one is going to see a difference. Putting waxy goo on your lashes does not make them any longer. The ads are showing you fake lashes. You will forget to remove the mascara and wake up the next day with under-eye circles. You will need special eye-makeup-remover to get the stuff off. If it rains (or worse, snows), you will immediately need to take cover. It's a gigantic pain in the neck for something that does approximately nothing unless, again, your eyelashes are near-translucent.

-There ought to be such a thing as enough when it comes to nail polish, but if you're someone who wants some, you want more. (Owning one bottle of clear, or a red from a decade ago, doesn't count.) That you already own beige doesn't mean you don't urgently need a sheer off-white. That you've got an orange-red doesn't mean you don't need a dark-red one ala "Vamp." That's just how it is. If you cared enough to buy the muted purple-pink, you will need a bubble-gum shade, as well as a pale-pink pastel, and why not a neon pink while you're at it. You can buy all the Opi and Essie you want, and still rationalize it by noting that you'd spend so much more if you got professional manicures. (It helps, with this rationalization, not to get professional manicures.) But you should still take it easy - $8 times infinity can add up.

WWPD Guides: How to be exceptional

If you're a Jew looking to make a name for yourself in the field of writing about your experiences as a Jew, what you need to do is set yourself apart from all other Jews. All of them.

Since that's impossible - there are Jews across every political and ideological spectrum - what you'll need to do is write as if you stand alone, courageous in the face of small-minded detractors. You need to present yourself as the very first Jewish person to consider, say, that the Palestinians are people, too. You thought of this! Or, for example, that intermarriage is not 'finishing what Hitler started', because of course every last Jew - but not you! - would say something like that. You might also opt to be the first Jew ever to not hate Christmas, not to keep kosher, not to have a nose job. Or the first to think Holocaust memory is sometimes exploited. You must contrast your iconoclastic self, on the one hand, with, on the other, some kind of amalgam of Uncle Leo, Mrs. Broflovski, Abe Foxman, Senator Lieberman, and Rabbi Schneerson.

The crazy thing is that this works. Every single time. Which is, I think, why Tablet is standing up for the Breslaw monstrosity. As David Schraub says, their defense of the piece that called Holocaust survivors "Jew shit" (oh, but in German) was that the author had been really thinking through her Jewish identity, and this was the truth she found, it ain't pretty, but so it goes. I mean, what will it be next week? Maybe we can get a Jewish man who's thought through his Jewish identity and the honest truth of it is, Jewish women are repulsive? Or a Jewish woman, on how all Jewish men are money-grubbing mama's boys? But these wouldn't be insulting - sorry, sincere - enough. Calling Holocaust survivors "Judenscheisse" is a tough act to follow.

The "exception" Jew is hardly a new concept. See Hannah Arendt, Sander Gilman. (Their work, that is.) This is when someone Jewish totally buys into Jewish stereotypes, realizes that lo and behold he does not meet all of them, but instead of thinking, hey, maybe the stereotypes don't accurately describe real people, he'll think, gosh, I'm the only Jew not like that. He will then 'bravely' say what no one else dares (well, that's how he sees it), and will 'admit' that Jews are pretty much horrible people. He will find a fan base among certain non-Jews - and certain Jews - but will rejoice every time a fellow Jew calls him "self-hating" or otherwise criticizes his stance. Depending how he plays it, it's either that other Jews are all humorless, thin-skinned prigs, or, conversely, that he's the only Jew who actually cares about humanity and isn't caught up in parochial concerns.

There have been "exception" Jews since forever. What's new is that information about what other Jews are like, what they believe, has never been more readily-available. It used to be that maybe you went to some small high school on Long Island where it actually was the case that you were the only Jewish girl in your class not obsessed with designer clothing, that you had this small sample against which you were comparing yourself, and you really did feel different. You might have tried to imagine the world beyond your immediate experience, but may have simply not known that these particular eight girls did not female Jewry make. You might have, even past high school, had the experience of not fitting in with those around you, and confused a sense of outsider-ness with something about Jews generally, like  how someone who had a tough time growing up in a small town in Mississippi might unjustly-but-understandably attribute a few bad apples to the South. 


But now, with the Internet, with the countless Jewish blogs and websites, not even getting into other blogs and articles written by self-identified Jews, it's extra inexcusable for anyone claiming an interest in things Jewish to pretend they don't know that Jews come in all kinds. To pretend that they stand alone in whatever it is they believe. OK, not anyone - in this case, a 14-year-old gets a pass. But that's it.

WWPD Guides: not worrying about it (too much)

Whereas men tend to underestimate what's necessary for looking their best, we - women - will often realize that we've been worrying about - and devoting time and money to - something to do with our appearances that we could perfectly well skip. See the women who imagine their lives will be radically different if only they lose five pounds, but who could perfectly well stay the size they are without facing any health or social-stigma consequences. See Edith Zimmerman's story of relying on, then abandoning, face makeup to cover acne, and later acne scars, only to discover that she looks just fine without the paint. See those of women who stop straightening their hair, only to discover that their natural hair texture suits them better and turns more heads.

We're often wrong in our assessments of what's worthwhile. We may overestimate the amount of artifice we "need" and end up looking (by the standards of our milieus) ridiculous. Or we might just end up looking the same. A woman with thick, dark eyelashes can fund the mascara industry if she wants, but why bother?


But the inefficacy of certain priming can't be the reason to liberate one's self from excessive primping, because sometimes artifice delivers. It's not always the Snooki "makeunder." You won't always look more tasteful or sophisticated if you switch to hippie soap/shampoo and no more. You may just look worse. This will not come as news to any woman who's gone to work bare-faced and been asked if she's tired, and not - as we might imagine - congratulated for her low-maintenance turn. 


"Not worrying about it" means accepting that abandoning whichever ritual might not amount to any improvements. It means outgrowing the middle-school imperative to look your best and then some. How you look matters - and can be controlled - less than you think. But yeah, it could be that you would look noticeably better doing X, Y, and Z, yet also that there are better uses of your time. These things are not inconsistent. Life is easier for the better-looking, but there's only so much primping can do, and there's a threshold at which you'd be better off changing other things about your life than your looks.


The idea, though, is not to take an absolutist stance. If you believe that X, Y, and Z make you look better, but you want to reduce time and money spent on primping, or chemical exposure, or simply the stress of worrying about it, what you can do is, make 'looking your best' a special-occasion thing, as opposed to a necessary-for-leaving-the-house one. Shift it down. You can look merely presentable, using your own judgment to tell where "presentable" ends (and this will vary, of course, depending what it is you do for a living) and "dolled-up" begins. 


This approach doesn't have the same liberation appeal as discarding the offending primping implements, as a great big bonfire filled with push-up bras and Clinique. But there's a huge difference between thorough hair-and-makeup to go to work and for a swanky party, between losing five pounds for aesthetic reasons for your wedding and spending your entire adolescent and adult life maintaining a weight that doesn't agree with you. 

How to "game"-blog UPDATED

Call it game, call it evo-psych, call it anti-PC men's-rights-and-dating-advice, genre-classification aside, anyone writing anything about gender on the Internet, anyone going around being female on the Internet, has probably encountered this world.

Another installment in the WWPD Guides series awaits you, dear readers. You want to start your own "game" blog? And who wouldn't? This is how it should be done.

-Hit the right tone. You want a dash of "telling it like it is," a pinch of "it must be true, it's Science," and a possibly satirical edge - maybe the whole thing's a big joke. That possibility needs to be there, even though you of course believe every bit of it.

-Start with a few undeniable, uncontroversial facts, then give the impression that your theory of relations between the sexes stems naturally from them. Facts like "desperate is unattractive" or "finding dates is easier for the rich and good-looking." Make it clear that things operate in radically different ways for men and women. Cultivate a comment base of men to whom it would never occur that couples tend to be well-matched both in terms of looks and socioeconomic status, to whom it would never occur that a little hard-to-get is equally attractive in both sexes.

-Make outrageous claims about the age at which women cease to be attractive. None of this tepid, 40-is-old nonsense. Asserting as if it's common knowledge that women past 26 are "cougars" is good; better yet would be to draw the line at 15, so that high school seniors can also feel past-it. The goal is to include as many women as possible in the ick category.

-Conflate, conflate, conflate. There's this one generic situation you're talking about - the getting of females - and it's best not to specify if you mean one-night-stands or relationships. The less specific you are, the fewer counterarguments you field.

-Generalize, generalize, generalize. Do your best to avoid specifying whether you're talking about yuppies or all Americans. Wait, what? Well-educated 35-year-old women these days tend to be at home with their husbands, not hitting the preserved-from-the-1970s-or-was-this-only-ever-on-sitcoms singles bars? Never mind. Man shortage, folks, remember? We have a man shortage on our hands.

-Oh, and most important of all: present yourself as God's gift to women. It's not like anyone knows what you look like, let alone what you have to offer a woman once you get her home. (Or anything else - what you really earn, where you really went to school, etc.) Do not be afraid to take this to a level that reads as, well, comical. State with confidence that any woman who fails to live up to your high standards (is over 22, did not buy her underwear at La Perla, goes out in shoes that aren't heels, wears too much makeup, foregoes makeup...) will be summarily tossed aside, because the line of Giseles outside your front door really is that long.

UPDATE

On the other, more sympathetic but still problematic end of the spectrum, here's Dan Savage advising a college kid whose girlfriend from HS is just not that into him anymore: "How many adults—people over 30—do you know who are still with and/or married to their high-school sweethearts? The answer is either zero or approaching zero." A fair point, but note the bit I highlighted. Adulthood, for these purposes, begins at 30? I guess getting married at 27 meant that I was a child bride, although I married my graduate school sweetheart. (I don't think Stuyvesant allows "sweethearts" to occur - part of the entrance exam is to test for extreme awkwardness between the ages of 14 and 18.)

This is a tricky issue. Defining adulthood as beginning at 30 sounds progressive, because it allows for an extended finding-one's-self stage, because it admits that women over 30 - real, grown women over 30, wrinkles, cellulite, the works - are a better bet, marriage-wise, than the smooth (if acne-covered) barely-pubescent. But it fails to take into account the relative difficulty for women of finding a male partner, especially for women who wish to have biological children, especially for women who wish to have children in general, because biological-without-IVF remains the least complicated route, with each passing year.

Perhaps all Savage means is that maybe a HS sweetheart marriage would make it to 25 but no further. But going by other things he's said/written, he often forgets that things are different for women than for (gay) men. (Why gay? Because these are the men who are not looking for women as partners.) Adulthood can good and well begin at 30 - why not 40? - if women are out of the picture. (Yet nearly all the 20-something gay men I know are in serious relationships, sometimes the kind that began in college, or seek those out: discuss.) It can kinda-sorta begin at 30 for straight men, but in this age of peer marriage, 35-year-old men are not finding themselves with 23-year-old women. Basically, we need to point out both that "women rot at (whichever age)" is nonsense, and that in the world we live in, for biological as well as social-construct reasons, telling women to only begin to think about settling down at 30 isn't the answer.