Trollerie

Via Antonia Noori Farzan, yes, "trolling" is the best way to describe this Observer story about the trouble it is for "'kids [...] somewhere between their mid 20s and their 40s, in some cases even older" who want their parents to buy them luxury apartments in Brooklyn. Their problem isn't that their parents are refusing to buy them apartments. It's that Brooklyn's too scruffy, as far as the parents are concerned. Not only is this the firstest worldest of non-problems, but it's framed as service journalism for the not-so-young adults in question:

And for those trying to convince their families to lend a hand, letting them see you take some knocks in the marketplace can be helpful. “Even when children are well established professionals with high income of their own, I see parents buying for them,” Ms. Sewtz, the Douglas Elliman broker, told the Observer. “Often, the child will be competing against cash buyers. And the parents see: Oh, again you lost out on a bidding war. Again you lost out. Hardly any parent sets out from the beginning and says, ‘Let me just buy you a mansion for three million dollars.’”

Well done, then,  Chris Pomorski! You've managed to far outshine Gwyneth-and-crew, whose "Gift Guide" includes a $4,739 gold... juicer, of course. Or does it? Which is the better trollerie - being knowingly out-of-touch (even turning one's out-of-touch-ness into a brand), or engaging in Styles-style rhetoric?

Firstest Worldest of Problems

Growing up, I always loved air-conditioning. Friends and family alike would remind me of the environmental and monetary costs, but what could I say? I enjoyed full-room refrigeration.

These days, eh, not so much. Maybe it's the guilt that comes with no longer having 'well at least I don't drive' as an excuse. Maybe it's time spent in Europe, and more time still spent with Europeans. Maybe it's that it just hasn't been all that hot this summer. But I'd sort of forgotten about a/c, and sort of stopped using it.

Which is a problem, it turns out. I've recently learned that the "leak" in my apartment is condensation caused by... drumroll please... not having the air conditioner on. And a fine a/c unit it must be. I've been officially instructed to keep it on at all times, windows closed, of course. (The leak hasn't stopped, but it's a puddle rather than a swimming pool.) As for the obvious, we don't pay extra for electricity. But even so.

In search of fries and mouse

-Mick Jagger's new lady is younger than I am. Eep.

-Shake Shack got rid of the crinkle-cut pre-frozen fries that were the reason I went to Shake Shack for my occasional fast-food needs, and replaced them with something vile that looks like high-end-restaurant fries but tastes like cold raw potatoes, or did today in Philadelphia. Why???

-For future reference: if you have a practical question about something really mundane, even if you happen to be a heterosexual woman sitting with your husband, even if your celebrity crushes are all dark-haired men from the 1990s who aren't what they once were but then again who is, don't go up to a modelesque blond woman in a coffee shop. I saw this woman using a wireless mouse with her laptop, and as I happen to be in the market for just that item (I haven't been able to click on anything properly for weeks), I thought I'd ask her where she got hers, seeing as she was using it with a computer similar to my own, and the search I'd done thus far led me to mice (?) too close in price to a new computer. But her response was a kind of like, why is someone talking to me in a coffee shop again, which, upon seeing what she looked like (I'd noticed her mouse!), I don't find hard to believe. Even the not-so-modelesque have this experience in coffee shops - I can only imagine. So what I learned was that she got her mouse "online." The search continues.

"I learnt classical Spanish, not the strange dialect he seems to have picked up." - Basil Fawlty's unconvincing excuse for not being able to communicate with Manuel.

Lately, I've spent time on a regular basis with no fewer than four native-French-speaking friends. And here's my problem: I associate French-the-language with French-the-discipline. I equate sending an email in French to emailing my advisor. To a situation where, if I mess up the gender of a noun, I might suffer professionally. Speaking aloud means formulating a coherent thought as one would in a seminar - something that might lead to a term-paper topic and maybe even a dissertation.

How did this come to be? Part of it's my own personality*, I suppose, but part of it is also, I'm convinced, about how I came to know French. I'd taken the language from age 8 on, but only really learned it while studying abroad in France. Which sounds so great - language immersion! Except that the immersion was in the form of intense UChicago courses conducted in French. The profs, some native-French and some not, all had impeccable French. But "French" was this thing whose grammar one learned in intricate detail, or the language of a giant stack of historical or literary texts. I'd read these texts in a genuine Parisian cafe... where the only French I'd speak was to order "un cafe, s'il vous plait." Our group lived not only together, but in an American dorm, with other Americans studying abroad. But there wasn't much time for hanging out - I had more (but also more interesting, given my interests) coursework that term than any other in college. Even if there were French people around, or if I'd been outgoing enough to track some down, I'm not sure when this socializing even would have taken place. Subsequent trips to Frahnce were like this but more so - but at least I have a dissertation to show for it? 

Anyway, I now have a new approach to addressing this. Rather than talking with a French-speaking friend in English, I explain that I'm shy about speaking French but very much want to do so. And then they'll speak French and so will I and that settles it. I just need to spell out what the issue is - i.e. that it isn't not knowing the language - and problem solved. 

*An actual anxiety dream I had recently: It took place (where else?) at my elementary/middle school. But I was enrolled. As an adult. Because even though in the dream (as in life), I had my high school diploma, there was some middle-school credit missing that I could only take at my middle school, like that's where the class was offered. (It didn't come up in the dream that I have a diploma or two beyond high school at this point, although in the context, it wouldn't have mattered.) I was in some office in my middle school lobby, or near the basement gym (which figures prominently in these dreams), trying to deal with the missing credit (my plan, in the dream, was sensible enough - I was going to let them know I already had a high school diploma, and had therefore finished as much of middle school as could possibly be necessary), when I saw a stack of some kind of... they were something like course evaluations, but students made them about one another, for the class I'd been taking (but, presumably, failing). And I could see two of them said that their problem with the course was a fellow student, Phoebe.

The dream ended on a strangely realistic note, with my thinking, huh, seeing as I'm on 91st and Madison anyway, I might as well stop for coffee and cake at Yura. My subconscious is a perfectly functioning Yelp when it comes to sit-down bakeries. 

Inadvertent cheapness triumph

I give up. I fail at shopping. I may be a heterosexual woman who grew up in New York, who studied French, who in stereotyped principle ought to be all about this, but at the end of the day, nope. I'm terrible at it.

I had spent the entire winter admiring a particular pair of Alpine brown leather hiking boots. They kept fluctuating in price from around $240 to around $310. I could imagine paying the former (as the previous such pair was one I wore from freshman year of high school until college), but not quite the latter. I'd been trying to find this kind of shoe for years, but kept wavering. $240 is still too much! Or is it? Yes! Or is it? Gah!

Finally, I realized that my lack of proper boots was causing, like, day-to-day inconvenience (the ice!), and when the boots dipped down once more to their lowest price, I hit "purchase." And then was like, maybe that was a mistake? So much money! But you can't cancel things so easily on Amazon once you've ordered them (I wouldn't think you could at all, but they offer this as a pseudo-option), so I figured, maybe forces greater than myself thought I should get the boots.

And then, lo and behold, the boots! So beautiful! So... enormous. For some reason, this company considers a 40 a U.S. women's 8. I'm a 7.5/8, which is more like a 38-39, which means these were not any kind of improvement over my existing footwear which, if nothing else, mostly fits. These basically slid off as I walked in them. So I put them back in the box, and sulked over to the mailroom with the return label and the boots.

Well, the return shipping label. Because I almost never shop online, and when I do, generally keep what I've bought because the process is so daunting, I'd forgotten to include the label that goes into the box. Much panic, much apologizing, and much humiliating myself before the mailroom staff on my second visit, I think I got the package right, and that the boots will be returned. Will I be ordering them in a smaller size? I think not.

Yoga to the rescue

Say you find yourself, at 23, with "fifteen pair of Christian Louboutin shoes, none of which [you] can walk in." This is, as I understand it, around $10,000 worth of near-unworn shoes. Say that your concern is less the YPIS-hurling you're in for if you openly discuss your collection in an online article, and more that you've got all these fab shoes you can't hobble around in. What are you going to do?

Yoga, of course! (Via.) Not yoga-the-spiritual-practice. The yoga that brought us leggings more expensive than pants. Flawlessly-toned women carrying those mats around town. An entire lifestyle based on a vaguely L.A. version of haute health. Point being, according to The Daily Beast, now there's a special kind of yoga for walking around in heels.

In any case, I'm not losing sleep over the commercialization of yoga, and can see the value of being able to walk in heels. And I'm impressed, or something, by the author's candor about her possessions. Mainly, though, I'm struck by what this hints at regarding journalism today - an entire pay-or-lack-thereof system predicated on the assumption that recent college grads' financial needs have already been met and then some. Indeed, that last bit is probably what inspired me to react to this story in the first place.

Public service announcement, super-parochial edition

Neat, isn't it, that Einstein used to live in that house? I know I thought so when I first moved here. I get it. But please, visitors and the otherwise curious: Don't walk backwards into the busy road the house is on, without looking, to get a better photo. Yes, I know to look out for this, because it's down the street and happens all the time. (I only screamed, 'Oh no, why is someone suddenly walking backwards into the road there???' the first few dozen times driving to town.) But what if someone's driving down the road - and it's just at the point where it's gone from 45mph to 25mph, so if they're not from the area, they may not have noticed and slowed down - and they don't know the significance of that nearly unmarked and otherwise ordinary-looking house? Hmm?

"I really wish that women would stop spinning."

It's supposed to be a thing, to be "in shape." But I remember failing the UChicago orientation-week fitness test (yes, this is, or was, also a thing), this despite being in what was by all accounts the best shape of my life - after three years of high school track, and before whichever college debauchery, which, granted, largely consisted of the vending machine outside the Maroon offices. I remember, during those high school track days, being just fine on long runs, but when it snowed and we had a "stairs" day in our ten-floor building, I... did not hold up as well.

And then there's this: I can now run reasonably long distances and reasonable paces: 10-minute miles for a seven-mile jog outside, or under nine per mile for a half-hour one on the treadmill. (Both of which required great effort to arrive at, so yes, I'm going to announce these stats in an obnoxious, braggy-overshare manner.) Yet biking to town, which takes maybe ten minutes, leaves me beat. Or it did today. The two hills (and these are nothing major) took all my might. Part of it was the flat-ish tires, and my not noticing them until quite far along on the bigger hill. Part of it was also that it's about a year since I've biked regularly, and several months since I've gotten on it at all, so whichever exact leg muscles are relevant for this, fine, may have atrophied.

But isn't there supposed to be such a thing as cardiovascular health? Or in colloquial terms, fitness? And isn't biking 1.5 miles supposed to require less of the stuff than running at least twice that distance? What is this "shape" they speak of, that's supposedly transferrable?

*****

Tracy Anderson continues (remember long-butt?) to fascinate:

I really wish that women would stop spinning. I say that with such conviction because almost every day in my office, I see women crying and unhappy because they can't fit into their jeans, because of the thigh bulking. 

When men lean in

There's a certain kind of rudeness that exists only in Euphemistic NJ, or maybe a handful of places like it. It's not the blunt, no-nonsense rudeness of a city, or the suspicion of outsiders of a remote small town. It's... here's what it is. It's that you're about to go into a coffee place (with your husband, lest this seem like a gender issue) and you hear a man (middle-aged, white, otherwise nondescript) say to his friends that he's going in to get a coffee. As we were in the doorway to the coffee shop already - we'd arrived first - the man says "excuse me" and pushes his way in front of us. Not to meet up with someone already in the place, but simply to cut in front of us in line and order his (complicated, as one might imagine it would be) drink first. Why? Because his coffee and time were just that much more important than ours. But he didn't seem especially rushed. He just... wanted what he wanted, and, uh, leaned in.

It was the kind of thing where it would have been entirely appropriate to say something, but what stopped me was less the potential for making a scene (not that that didn't enter into it at all), but the sheer awe I was in at his sense of entitlement. It was just... people do that? I wasn't so much upset by what had happened as amazed. I've seen variants of this while driving, or while commuting by train, so I could see how it fit with... not by any means how everyone here behaves, but a certain percent of the population. But this was a truly beautifully-executed example.

Distractions

I know that a problem I'd often have, when trying to finish my dissertation (which I finished! woohoo! making me technically all-but-defense) was that the river views of my Manhattan penthouse duplex posed such a distraction. As were the continuous deliveries of caviar and Louboutins.

In all seriousness, I will say that the wildlife outside my window in NJ does pose a distraction. Not so much the wildlife itself (although I find the colorful birds endlessly fascinating) as having the kind of dog where, at so much of the hint of a distant squirrel, this needs to be announced as if it's the most shocking thing that ever happened. Imagine, a squirrel, in a wooded area of the Northeastern U.S.! But frolicking rabbits, large families of deer, a neighbor's outdoor cat, these are all visible from Bisou's perch, a spot on top of a chair, next to a big window. Each mammal elicits a different bark. The deer might be the worst.

As repetitive as "The Squirrel and Rabbit Show" might seem to me, as far as Bisou is concerned, this is some serious drama - "Mad Men" or "The Wire" or some other show I've never seen but might consider watching now that the thing is turned in. I'll think she's fast asleep, and then she's somehow detected a far-flung rodent, and off we go for another round.

"Styles style" and autobiographical projection

While Miss Self-Important's definition of "styles style" covers much of the lifestyle-journalism genre, I'm going to offer up a second definition, to cover the rest. Mine is as follows: A writer has had a certain experience, or found something to be true. But because an essay just observing something isn't journalism, the author is compelled to pretend that whichever thing feels true to them actually is true for people generally.

On some level, though, the author gets that this isn't the case. So the author compromises and insists that whichever thing is true, but only of those of a certain class/in certain regions. This will seem less obviously false than claiming whichever thing is true of absolutely everybody in the country-or-world, but may amount to, the author found some friends who've had the same experience. As if, if you give a disclaimer about how you're only talking about the privileged, problem solved, and it somehow doesn't matter that what you're describing isn't necessarily representative of any caste. Or there may be - oh, there will definitely be - a survey cited that doesn't exactly prove the point, but that provides the heft of the quantitative. Autobiographical projection? What are we calling this, then?

Example: Frank Bruni on personal trainers. Everybody has one. Except not everybody. Except kinda-sorta everybody. There are - Science! - more personal trainers than there used to be, but still not enough for it to be plausible that a significant number of Americans are being personally trained.

But one most gets the sense that Bruni's talking about Bruni and not a broader cultural phenomenon from this sentence: "Many food lovers I know intersperse their trainer-monitored calisthenics with lavish meals at the latest restaurant: one lunge forward, one waddle back." Bruni has written extensively about the impact being the NYT restaurant critic - his former job - had on his weight. But getting fat from "lavish meals at the latest restaurant" is something beyond first-world problems. It's... major-publication-restaurant-reviewer problems. (Yes, there's probably some hyper-elite dining out at glam places nightly, but if they're not in the food industry, they're more likely to just be picking at their food.)

The problem, as I see it, isn't that Bruni has written about his experiences with personal training. It's that he's expected to pretend that these experiences are shared more widely than he could possibly demonstrate.

Things that are not underwear

-Conor and Elizabeth just did a Bloggingheads where they talk about my fiction-is-better hypothesis. Conor suggests a move towards a new genre somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, using the techniques of non-fiction but without the overshare-about-real-people element. This I'd certainly support, although I'm not sure it - or different versions of it - doesn't exist. There are articles where pseudonyms are used. And one does notice that in the blog comments at Motherlode and such, people are happy to take stories seriously even if the author is identified only as Alice in Omaha (say). And then there are works of fiction that play with the idea of being non-fiction - Philip Roth using the protagonist "Philip Roth," for example. But maybe there should be some genre in its own right that somehow full-on captures the public appetite for non-fiction - 'reality' - while at the same time sparing identifying information? More on this later, most likely.

-Friends, Facebook friends, currently in Paris: I "like" your posts, but I also envy. Tremendously. Dessert would be nice. But the best bet in the area - the only one, really - is an ice cream place. Ice cream would do, but it's pouring. If such a thing existed, I would call the waaambulence and have it take me to the nearest decent-pastry-having establishment.

-A department list email with info about a six-month internship that would prefer "graduate students and recent graduates." I feel as though I've blogged about this posting before - I guess they advertise this position a lot, considering the rather limited market for an unpaid job for which you need to be quite that old/educated/fluent in French/having of prior work experience. Seemingly legal, but also seemingly the sort of thing that ought to pay. The annoying thing is that other than the thing where it doesn't pay, it sounds like a great job.

Adulthood Studies: how do you buy pants?

I've decided I don't have a problem with leggings, or even leggings-as-pants (despite having once received 15 minutes of fame for complaining about the style). No, my problem is with the legging-ification of all women's pants, and British readers, I mean "pants" in the American sense. They are now all stretch pants. Jeans, yes, but other styles as well. I checked, and my corduroys are stretch. They are not legging-ish at all, and yet, 2% stretch. Because these corduroys are on the ancient side (but not that ancient - they're from the post-spandex era), the spandex bit has ceased to function, making them baggy in precisely the most unflattering way possible.

I understand why this is meant to be a good thing - women's clothes are expected to fit just so, yet human beings' weight/shape tends to fluctuate. And the stretch-jeans will, at least when new, fit perfectly. But... I don't want to wear leggings all the time. Or if I'm going to do that, I might as well throw in the proverbial towel and get a really nice pair at the Lululemon in town, and wear those to all occasions, formal and informal. Leggings that aren't pretending to be regular pants, these I respect. But I want some regular pants that wouldn't inspire theoretical Daily Mail reporters to write that I'm flaunting my curves. I don't want to hide my form, I just want normal pants, like men get to wear, and like women got to wear until polyester-and-spandex had to be woven into absolutely everything. And this did once exist! I can't find a full-length image, but the ones Teri Hatcher wears on "Seinfeld" - very flattering, not "mom jeans," but definitively pre-jeggings. (Wears? Wore. I might be stuck in what was apparently 1993. 20 years ago. Yikes.)

And yes, I've tried the men's department. Despite being short, there are lots of men's jeans in my size - something to do with women having longer legs, and perhaps with waist sizes for men being less vanity-based than for women (and also: the lack of stretch). And... actual men's jeans are not like "boyfriend" jeans for women, but designed to flaunt - or at least comfortably contain - that which cisgender women haven't got. If you are such a woman and you've had luck with men's jeans, more power to you (and do tell me where), but the one's I've run across might ostensibly fit, but I wouldn't want to leave the house like that.

This quest, this eternal quest, has led to some possibilities. A.P.C. proved useless, but whatever these are, I tried them on in a store in Philadelphia, and the very moment I cease to be horrified by $112 jeans with $9.50 shipping, maybe? (Must I, god forbid, drive to Philadelphia? On the highway? And parallel park when I get there? Avoiding this is worth $9.50, right?) These (via) sure look spectacular, but are they, and if so, at $225, would I even want to know? For the most part, though, the search leads either to mom-jeans (which I did order last year, and which are now a perfectly adequate pair of cutoffs) - and these days even those mostly seem to have stretch - or to some kind of patriotic cult of denim. These jeans will not only be Made in the U.S.A. (and all-cotton jeans seem to be, as a rule) but compatible with "concealed carry," which, no thanks.

Insufficiently-critical shopper

Oh happy day, Princeton now has an Urban Outfitters.

A sentence like this needs context: until the arrival of said Outfitters, if you wanted low-end, there was, what, J. Crew? Which, especially these days... kind of mid-to-high-end. New additions in town include a deck-shoe store and a Brooks Brothers, but there's also Ralph Lauren, J. McLaughlin, Kate Spade, I think a Lilly Pulitzer. Oh, and the Princeton-sweatpants store. What am I forgetting? The lacrosse shop. In other words, although I'm not averse to clothes-shopping, I had managed to live here, what, a year and a half, most of it time without many trips into the city or a car, without buying any clothing whatsoever in town.*

Say what you will about Urban Outfitters - that it's vintage-knock-off, poor-quality, overpriced junk aimed at those too square for real vintage-shopping; that it's mall-clothing for 12-year-olds; that it's a subliminal plot to turn young people into Republicans; or that it's generally obnoxious. Say it - you're not telling me anything I don't know. But when it comes to town, I'm not what would be called a "critical shopper." There is now a store I could walk (OK, bike) to that sells normal clothing. $40 jeans. $15 (U.S. union-made, apparently) hats. Actually, really gorgeous $15 hats (we will look past the fact that a similar hat is cheaper in Japan, even though I think they're made in Pennsylvania or possibly even New Jersey - Princeton is Princeton, and if a hamburger's $14...). I broke my no-garments-purchased-in-town policy to buy the absolute perfect gray hat, one I can't find a photo of online, but that's basically the acrylic version of this. It's just so cool, so Acne, so A.P.C., so Gwyneth-on-a-good-day, this thing that I bought in Princeton.

*While I've come to accept online shopping as a fact-of-living-in-the-woods, online clothes-shopping, not so much. Meanwhile, to give town its due, there is also a consignment store where the less-exciting Talbots goes to be subtly reduced, as well as an out-of-the-way, barely-counts-as-in-town, has-some-potential thrift shop where they make you check your bag, which, if you want this to be a dissertation-break, means you end up holding your computer as you browse, which is not necessarily worth it.

But who will review the reviewers?

A. O. Scott's review of Judd Apatow's latest, "This Is 40," tells us basically that the movie is about first-world problems. Scott even links to the First World Problems website, informing us that such a site exists. And that really is the gist of the review, tempered but dominant: that Apatow's privilege is showing:

Cushioned by comforts that most of their fellow citizens can scarcely imagine, they nonetheless feel as if things were starting to go pear-shaped. (Only metaphorically: The two of them are enviably trim, in spite of Pete’s weakness for cupcakes. He bikes a lot.) “Do you still even like me?” Debbie asks her husband in one of many moments of vulnerability. An entirely plausible answer would be: Who cares? We’ve all got troubles, sister.

Scott faults the protagonists (well, their creator) for not being do-gooders, for not, I suppose, owning their privilege: "In a town that runs on philanthropic fund-raisers and celebrity activism, Pete and Debbie support no cause beyond themselves." This strikes me as a baffling critique of a movie about the inner workings of a marriage. How "entitled" someone comes across at home is probably not all that related to how much good they do when out in the world. Should they have met some kind of community-service requirement, with this somehow woven into this movie that I haven't seen and might not get around to seeing because I'm far more curious about "Guilt Trip"?

"Freaks and Geeks," the reason we care about Apatow in the first place, was also first-world problems - reasonably-well-looked-after white kids navigating the social minefields and unrequited crushes (James Franco before he was James Franco, sigh) of a suburban American high school. Why is this now, suddenly, a concern?

It seems important, then, that Apatow 'discovered' Lena Dunham, is deeply involved in the show "Girls," and includes Dunham in this latest cast as well. Entertainment had been about the petty problems of well-off, well-connected white people since forever, but we-as-a-society somehow only noticed when Dunham came on the scene. (Perhaps because the petty problems of white men, or super-good-looking white women, are more what we're accustomed to? But I digress.) The issue with Apatow had been sexism - flabby, stoned man-children paired off with taut but humorless blondes. But now it kind of has to be YPIS, because he's behind the Dunham phenomenon.

Anyway, the other gist of the review is that this sounds like a mediocre movie that's semi-autobiographical in a self-indulgent way. This is a valid criticism to make of a film (of this one I can't say), but it's something different from first-world problems. Also, that tag - which I use! - needs to be wielded with some precision. Existential angst, love-troubles, etc. might be experienced some of the time by bratty rich people, but these are not first-world problems. (Is Anna Karenina first-world problems?) First-world problems are - and I will give an example from my own stash - things like, the difficulties of finding iced coffee while on a research trip to Paris. Meanwhile, a deeper problem might well hide under the guise of a series of first-world problems, like, say, a 40-year-old couple fighting over seemingly petty things but really there's more to it. Which might be that movie, or not, but it sounds kinda crap so I don't plan on seeing it. Or, if I'm ever on a flight where it's the best option, I'll watch it, but grudgingly, and that can be my very own first-world problem.

Do we need more service-industry tell-alls?

Leonard Lopate informs us that there's a new book out, a dramatic tell-all in which it's revealed that hotel staff prefer polite customers who tip. Another service-industry confession, in other words, a genre that can only hold out for so long. After all, most of us don't reach adulthood without having some job during which we learn that behind whichever pristine façade is work, filthy work. (The worst I learned first-hand was that your regular coffee might actually be decaf - which I'd have guessed - but I wasn't in food-service for long.)

From what I can tell, the revelations in any such confession are limited to the following:

-People like it when you give them money.
-Do not go to people who work X job to ask what a normal/acceptable tip is for someone in that position, unless you want to be told some inflated nonsense. (I'm looking at you, waitstaff who claim a 30% tip is standard in NYC restaurants.)
-They may smile and act all friendly, but service-industry workers are not helping you out of the goodness of their hearts. They are not your actual friends - unless, you know, they happen to be people you're friends with.
-Service-industry workers, like other human beings, are 'on' at work, but when 'off,' or when out of sight, engage in non-work-appropriate behavior.
-Things you yourself didn't clean/cook are less hygienic than ones you did.
-There's random bodily this-and-that where you'd least expect it.
-And it doesn't actually matter. Your immune system can handle it, whatever it is. If you're seriously germophobic, maybe don't go outside, but if you're someone who has a dog, someone who has used the facilities at Penn Station and survived, etc., you will live and let live.

Oh, and the continued popularity of this genre suggests that there's a certain sort of person desperate for the approval of service-industry workers in particular, who will treat every encounter as if it's with the Soup Nazi, and who will spend time reading up on how to get on the good side of a bell-man. (Are there no bell-women? Is our only concession to PC acknowledging the bell-individual's adulthood?) This is different, I think, from basic manners, and from wanting to know what's an appropriate tip.

The neurosis Facebook invented

Emily "Prudence" Yoffe (and bear with me even if you're not a Prudie fan, this is merely the point of departure) recently got the following neurotic letter, signed "Hurt Guy":

Two of my dear friends from college got married to each other last weekend. I haven't seen them in four years, but we communicate from time to time on Facebook. I can think of three possibilities why I wasn’t invited: 1) My invitation got lost in the mail. 2) They forgot to invite me. 3) They chose not to invite me. I feel stung, left out, and hurt. Thanks to social media, I have seen photos and video from the rehearsal dinner, wedding, and reception. The event was not small; there were banquet tables for college classmates. For nearly two years, the bride and groom and I were among a tight-knit group who spent hours working together on the college newspaper. Outside of school we had parties at each other's apartments and long conversations over pitchers of beer. Is there were a tactful way to find out why they didn't include me?

Prudie responded with a nod to social-media weirdness, but concluded, "[U]ltimately it’s your problem if you feel you were robbed of a slice of the wedding cake." Which is on the one hand true, and on the other not quite right. I didn't think she was fair to the guy, because as neurotic as he does come across, Facebook has a way of bringing these neuroses to the fore. If you have these neuroses at all - and not everybody does, but I suspect most do - Facebook will magnify them.

Well, not so much magnify them as distort them. Facebook has brought us a form of neurosis that may not have existed before: the fear that people who you aren't close with, maybe hardly even know, or were close with ages ago, are hanging out without you. Whereas we all know that Facebook highlights preexisting anxieties - X is going to Yale Law School, X is engaged, X ran a marathon, X looks awesome in a Speedo - Facebook might well have invented this other problem. OK, maybe not invented - there have always been hyper-neurotic egomaniacs - but this was not among the normal human insecurities. Now, it has joined the more everyday - and rational! - anxiety about social exclusion from actual people in your life. That, too, can be magnified by Facebook, but this is something else. It's about feeling excluded from people who are not in your life, who you don't especially wish were in your life.

Facebook, in other words, gives you a warped sense of who you know, and how recently you were in touch with them. You may find that the people who feel most present in your life aren't the ones you actually see on a regular basis (friends who, for example, may not be on the site, or may not post much, or much that's personal), but the ones who amply document every social engagement. The whole if-it-isn't-on-Facebook-it-doesn't-count phenomenon. Wherein the people you actually hung out with last night feel less present than the ones who put 500 inexplicably captivating vacation photos. (Always in Greece, for some reason.)

The Prudie letter may not seem to fit the bill, because the guy says these were his close friends in college... or does it? Were they his close friends who've since abandoned him, or are they the acquaintances he remembers best, because they dominate his news feed?

The reason I feel for Mr. Neurosis is that I've totally had twinges of this, where, however momentarily, I find myself wondering why some people I haven't actually seen in person since I was 12 are hanging out without me. And this isn't even a neurosis I had at that age, when I was intensely concerned with friendship dynamics. I can't remember ever caring at all that a people not in my own circle presumably hung out on weekends. It wouldn't have occurred to me. I had all the usual clique anxieties of a middle-schooler at a Manhattan girls' school, but this, alas, wasn't one of them.

But Facebook distorts your concept of who your circles even consist of. These people who are your friends (who are, if you paused and thought about it for a moment, no such thing, but they keep appearing under that heading every time you sign on, and anything repeated enough times sounds reasonable) are hanging out without you. How dare they! Never mind that you would not in a million years have invited them to go do something, or indeed remembered that they existed if it weren't for the news feed. It can still feel, in that instant, like a rejection.

Obviously, the pro-sanity approach is to be self-aware, to allow the moment to pass, not to write a letter to an advice columnist, and most definitely not to angrily confront someone who maybe "liked" something you posted a year ago regarding why they didn't think to include you at BBQ held in a state you've never even visited. The great life lesson of adulthood is that other people are far more wrapped up in themselves than they are in you, and that's even the people who are, in some meaningful sense, in your life.

On wanting my bangs like that

To the hairdressers of Central NJ,

You are convenient, reasonably-priced, and do a good job. I get why you ask, but I here is my promise: Yes, I want my bangs like that. "Are you sure?" Yes. "Sure?" Yes. I really, truly do want something in the Laura Petrie or Rooney Mara realm, early-mid-'60s gamine meets space-age. (Closer to the former.) I'm not asking for a mohawk or pastel ombré, just a slightly different length and angle than is standard among the customer base of the Witherspoon Grill, and would do this myself (and have!) if I weren't about to start teaching next week and thus inclined to keep DIY experimentation to a minimum.

And if it turns out I don't like this style, that your skepticism was warranted, I promise not to come back and complain (and I hear that, customers no doubt do this), and to remember that hair grows (which no doubt some fussy types forget). But this was what I wanted, as my enthusiasm (and tip) ought to have indicated. I liked it so much, I'll be coming back for more.

Yours loyally,
WWPD

"The mistake happened in the middle of our meal, during the beet course."

The ultimate first-world problem makes it to (where else?) the NYT lifestyle pages.

Acculturation fail

Today began with a vaguely Greek-looking man in front of my husband at a bakery having trouble ordering, and the person behind the counter attempting, in vain, to bond with my husband about those foreigners... My husband, that is, who's not German, and thus is only mostly sure that this was the nature of the interaction.

Later I walked the poodle around an area dedicated to public daytime drinking by 15-year-olds. While I'm not convinced that 21 makes sense, given that it makes effective criminals of otherwise upstanding college students and others college-age, and while I was 15 recently enough to remember that this is the age at which not-especially-troubled kids (11, say, is a different story) will sometimes begin that part of their lives, it hasn't ceased to surprise me each time I see this (which is every day) that everyone, including kids who look practically like middle-school students, can drink this publicly. Beers are clutched during sporting activities (and there are always sporting activities), vodka bottles are passed around, all with no particular sense of taboo, by what appear to be all the different teenage cliques, freaks, geeks, and cool kids alike. This approach to alcohol is, I am assured, and my own experience of France confirms, not a European thing, but a German one. And I have no particular opinion about it, other than that it makes walking a dog trained (inadvertently) only to "go" on mowed grass somewhat difficult.

This evening, once my husband was home and thus able to watch Bisou to verify that she was staying as silent as an inanimate object lest the neighbors complain, I went out to get some meat. While I'll make sure to know enough to ask for whatever it is I've gone somewhere to buy, when there are follow-up questions, that's when things become more difficult. I had set out to get steak, ideally not the one that was 60 euros a kilo. I said which one I did want, and asked - all of this is in German - for 300 grams, bitte.

Somehow this ended up being nearly a kilo of a different kind. I think the guy thought I wanted three large steaks? Given that the last time I was in Germany, a request for a "Bretzel" (pretzel) was understood to mean that I wanted a "Latte Macchiato," this wasn't so surprising. The meat was all somewhere in the back, so the default point-and-hand-gesture option was out. As was the other butcher, where I'd had no particular issues making the very same purchase, because that one closes at six, this one somewhat later, and my husband gets home at 6:15, and leaving Bisou alone for ten minutes - during which time it's not impossible that she'd bark - isn't an option.

After a great deal of looking hopeless, and seeing this massive steak (I at least was able to convey I didn't want three such slabs), I finally gave up pretending to know what was what and uttered one English word, kicking myself for the trillionth time this trip for having forgotten, in the poodle-centric packing, my German phrasebook, yet remembering that whatever I said, even if the correct expression came to me in time, it would sound incomprehensible: "Cost?" 14 euros. I tried, in Germanglish with hand signals, to ask whether I could have half, or at any rate less. No! This was evidently an outrageous question to ask, one that revealed me to be a forest child new to civilization.

I suppose I was prepared to accept this and buy the whole cow if need be, but it didn't to go in that direction. Another man who worked there - the boss? - said it was OK to cut me a smaller piece. I tried to explain no, no more cutting the slab of meat, I don't want problems, but sure enough, there it was, what I'd set out to order, more or less. Awkward, but over, or so I thought.

When I was paying, I apologized, this time fully in English, thinking some apology was better than none. The guy who'd cut the meat took the opportunity to explain to me (in English, which he'd until that point given no impression of speaking with such fluency) just how much I'd screwed up, he now can't sell that other piece he cut, really driving the point home. I then included in my continuous, flustered apology my best attempt at an explanation, namely that I didn't know the procedure, didn't enunciate, didn't gauge quickly enough that an irreversible meat-slicing was underway, or some babbled mix of the above, but it was clear what I had to do was get out of the store as quickly as possible and never return. No worries there!

Given that I'm not even such a fan of meat in the first place, I may choose to interpret this as a higher power telling me to eat entirely vegetarisch. Maybe I should pick up some trendy food restrictions as well. If I'm going to be a difficult American abroad, it's only right.