American Lament

Spring has sprung, and as always it presents the population with brand new activities to enjoy. (Granted, here in Western Pennsylvania the concept of the first day of spring is purely academic.) Circumstances have changed and the things once thought lost causes in the dark recesses of winter now become golden opportunities to screw up the rest of your year. So have fun this spring, and keep these thoughts close to the top of your mind:

Baseball: Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, why? Watching baseball is bad enough. It’s a boring, archaic game, less a pure sport of athletics and synergy and more of chunky guys battling it out for the best ever in hand-eye coordination—and not just for hitting the ball out of the park but poking a syringe needle into a butt cheek. People who follow baseball (read: people over the age of 50) will fulminate about the balance of pitching and hitting, and the intricate strategy involved in the process of the game. This is—to put it diplomatically—a steaming pile of lies and sinful transgressions. Baseball is reduced to “hack at ball with bat, run if you hit” when you get right down to it. And the only strategy involved is somehow managing to keep your salary costs low enough that you can laugh all the way to the bank to cash your luxury tax check. It doesn’t need to be said that the situation is entirely different for hockey, which, thanks to the foresight of the National Hockey League, the average season lasts about 18 months and pretty much any team with a stick and at least for Norwegians can make the playoffs. (sorry, Columbus.) It can therefore also be legitimately classified as a spring sport.

Finding Love: Spring is a notoriously busy time for getting notoriously busy. Bulky sweatshirts are shed, the air is fresh and breezy, and pink haltertops and sandy beaches are a pleasant substitute for an otherwise expensive Cialis prescription. Hormones are normally escalated to the point that the mere coexistence of opposing genders is enough to spark romance, as is evidenced by the popularity of spring break, dance clubs, and book store checkout lanes. (Hey, to each their own.) A word of warning, though: getting too preoccupied in the spring may lead to a summer of question marks and warning signs, a fall of stressful conversations and raging battles of reality versus star-struck love, and a destined, lonely winter bundled up in Uggs and your grandmother’s comforter, drinking hot chocolate laced with rum and listening to the Indigo Girls. I’m just sayin’.

Spring Cleaning: After the winter doldrums, where most people stay indoors breathing recycled air and not cleaning, it’s not only cathartic for people to clean, it’s also a good way to get your husband off his ass to do work by not putting out until he does. (See above.) A lot of junk accumulates over the fall and winter months, and most people will spend plenty of time carting bucketfuls of kitsch and paperwork, partly from a devoted sense of cleanliness, and partly from going through about one-fifth of last year’s insurance papers and tax forms before declaring “screw it” and chucking the whole pile in the wastebasket. It’s also useful as a psychological tool; the symbolic “cleaning of the house” will be a good segway to getting your own state of affairs in order, at least for the next two weeks before you get weak and eat a plate of chicken wings and call your ex.

Speeding: Spring often affords a small window of glorious, glorious opportunity for most people: exceeding the speed limit. At least, it is for people in temperate zones such as myself. During the winter months, large piles of gray, disgusting snow pile up on roads and make truly ridiculous speeding difficult to manage. After spring, road work tends to slow things down, since construction workers tend to look unkindly upon those who go 85 through work zones. So after the black ice melts but before the cones go up, it’s a wonderful opportunity to live out that fantasy you’ve always had: to put the metal to the medal and see how fact your Sebring can go on the highway. I’m cautiously putting my money on “not very much.”

Gardening: For those of you who aren’t aware that World War II is over, gardening presents a wonderful opportunity to 1) occupy your time with horticulture and nature; 2) get some exercise and fresh air after a stuffy winter; and 3) spend months upon months of hard and sweaty labor so that, at the beginning of fall, you will have about six medium-size deformed tomatoes and two dozen cucumbers that no one will ever eat, ever. Still, it’s a good way to get some use out of that straw hat you for some reason own, unless you plan on moving to Sao Paulo to be a banana rancher or star in a coffee commercial.

So there you have it, in rough order of who caresedness. Remember that spring is not only a reminder that new opportunities await the initiated, but also that taxes are soon to be due, demolishing all your hopes and dreams for a prosperous new season. Happy filing!

It’s about time we talked about lip gloss.

Cosmetic fads tend to kind of fly under my radar most of the time, since I’m hardly in the market; the only cosmetics I wear are other women’s lipstick on my collarbone. (Those who know me well can vouch that that is a purely theoretical statement.) And I’m selectively uninformed about it; I lump lip gloss together with all other lip-related makeup, up to and including Carmex and self-induced collagen implants, one step of personal knowledge somewhere between color coordinating shoes with purses and The Gilmore Girls.

Thankfully, due to my crack research team of me looking up stuff on the Wikipedia thirty seconds before starting to write anything, I know a little bit about what the lip gloss thing is all about. Namely, It’s yet one more thing caged rabbits have sacrificed their eyes for to make certain parts of our face slightly shinier.

Lip gloss, ostensibly, is used to put a brilliant sheen on your lips, not unlike lipstick or about a hundred other products. Of course, lip gloss is quick and easy to apply and, most importantly, also is available with glitter, metallic, and frosted accents for those times when you want to look like a 13-year-old girl with identity issues or perhaps a seductress combing the world for a mark who is attracted to making out with a girl whose lips remind them of a microwave oven.

Of course, I’m probably missing the point, mostly because I don’t care too terribly much for cosmetics. I think most women are beautiful enough as they are and don’t need artificial methods of enhancing their attractiveness. Then again, I also believe in a gold standard and Quentin Tarantino movies, so perhaps my judgment should be viewed with a rather large grain of salt.

But, still, it seems that lip gloss has benefited from a rather remarkable marketing campaign. Lip gloss is sold as an alternative to a lot of different cosmetics, when really it’s just toned down lipstick without all the fussing about with colors or materials. While plenty of women in their twenties and thirties wear it, many of the new lip gloss innovations seen to gear their pitch to younger, preteen girls, with their aforementioned accents and flavored varieties. (It tastes like money, I presume.) Some are even sold as health supplements, used (I guess) to heal the burning, inalienable feeling that somewhere in Southeast Asia a poverty-stricken child has pale lips.

Of course, lip gloss is highly popular with young women, personified in the lamentable movie Bratz, a serene attempt to somehow convert all of the negative stereotypes of materialistic (yet strangely and eerily diverse) youth propagated by the popular doll set into a family-friendly motion picture, the moral of which, like all women-coming-of-age stories, I guess has to be “Be yourself, assuming that yourself includes lip plumper, tight pastel T-shirts with glitter writing on it, and greenish highlights to piss off your grandmother who in about six years will unbeknownst to you give you the money you will take to college supposedly to buy books and Yaffa blocks with but you will use it to buy your first brick of hash with instead.” The movie, which I will proudly admit I have not seen, apparently is the first movie to have more screen time devoted to the application of lip gloss than actual dialogue, kind of a Pax-TV-version ratio worthy of comparison with Goodfellas. Of course, a movie such as Bratz whose depth is such that falling into it would have a scarce chance of inducing vertigo, less dialogue and more lip gloss is probably a positive development.

The virtues of lip gloss is not lost on the entertainment industry, who view the preteen market as a lucrative demographic as yet to be tapped, at least once you factor out Hannah Montana tickets, ponies, pink cell phones, and (I assume) posters of Corey Haim. (Hey, you’ll have to forgive me if my frame of reference for young teenage girls stopped around 1989. I’ve been busy.) Two—count ‘em—two songs have been released entitled Lip Gloss, one way back in 1993 when I’m pretty sure lip gloss was simply a twinkle in a 3M engineer’s eye. Of course, that song is by a British alternative rock band and whose lyrics appear to be largely symbolic of things that are definitely more related to the back rooms of Glasgow pubs instead of pre-teen-girls. (Actually, I doubt this is true. I’m just saying it because, as with all British media I come into contact with, I assume every word is cockney rhyming slang for some unearthly depraved sexual act.) The other is by Lil’ Mama, the lyrics of which appear to have little to do with cosmetics and a lot to do with repetition. At least it’s good to know that, black or white, rich or poor, Britpop or hip-hop, we all have one thing in common, and that’s lip gloss. Unless you’re male, then, well, no. We have Corey Haim.

One of the more terrifying aspects of modern society is the feeling of helplessness, of a loss of control. Sure, in decades past it may have been a Russian nuclear warhead pointed directly at the White House, or perhaps a seemingly random attack by a Muslim fundamentalist or Patty Hearst. But absolutely nothing—nothing—compares to the unheeded peril of walking into an airport restroom while in the presence of a senator.

The most tragic thing about the Larry Craig scandal—I mean, besides his family being forever embarrassed, the loss of prestige of the normally staid Senate, and the misdirection of attention to other more compelling public policy issues, such as the subprime mortgage collapse and Lindsay Lohan being barely dressed on the cover of Maxim magazine—is that I am now officially scared of using the men’s room.

Now, granted, there’s always been a little bit of trepidation in going into any public restroom. There’s no surprise that many citizens avoid them at all costs, including but not limited to taking a leak in the empty Dairy Queen cup you found on the floor of the back seat while driving down the interstate instead of setting foot one into the Quick-N-Go john. Public restrooms, much like the refrigerators at work and the city park after Saturday night, are all the proof that anyone will ever need that communism is a failed ideology. There are so many variables that can affect your bathroom experience, and a large portion of those variables are inherently disgusting.

I’m going to pause right now and advise all my readers that the scenarios I am describing are largely male-specific. Thankfully, I have very little experience in going into the women’s restroom. Now some of you may have risen their eyebrows at the phrase “little experience,” no doubt prompting the thought “that pervert should have no experience with female toiletries.” I regret to say that this is false. For a summer I worked at a rather large retail department store known for their blue décor and lackadaisical attitude towards health care and Chinese quality control procedures, and part of my job description was to “maintain” the restrooms. Now, thankfully, “maintaining” and “cleaning” are two different things; all I had to do was make sure there were enough soap and towels, and reports any gushing streams of rancid water to the proper authorities, which was the 22-year-old community college communications major they installed as the night manager. But I had to maintain both genders’ worth of restrooms, and let me simply state that I would rather watch Faces of Death repeatedly for the remainder of my life than ever take a job that requires me to witness the horrifying things I’ve seen in the better half’s bathroom ever again.

Anyway, Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has introduced a scary element into an already scary activity. There is, apparently, a remarkably elaborate and menacingly simple set of nonverbal cues that has evolved by those who are interested in engaging in non-digestive-related activities in the restroom. Toe tapping, hand waving, and strategically placed luggage all seem to indicate to otherwise casual observers that you want more than a handful of Charmin and last week’s Saturday Evening Post to pass the time while you do your business.

And that’s why I’m concerned. Who knows what happens when I go in there? What if I sneeze at the wrong time? What if I hear “Afternoon Delight” over the muzak speaker and accidentally tap my shoes to the beat one too many times? I would normally dismiss it and state that this is something one wouldn’t have to worry about unless you were at a historically seedy location such as a bus terminal or a check-cashing establishment, but I always assumed that the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport would have met and exceeded that particular threshold.

This isn’t Craig’s first accusation of impropriety. Way back in the early 80’s, he was involved in the congressional having-sex-with-pages scandal, otherwise known as “Lucky Bastardgate.” And congressional Republicans have had to fend of a series of embarrassing scandals, from Mark Foley’s clumsy propositioning of male pages to Ted Stevens’s apparent lack of ability in participating in any form of public policy debate without handing a sackful of cash to oil company executives, an action of dubious constitutionality if not for the fact that petroleum extraction is one of the three branches of the Alaskan government.

Craig has since resigned, apparently in response to him losing the chairmanship of the Creepy Bathroom Sex Solicitor Caucus. His political future is in doubt, as elective office now seems out of place and a career as the more glam half of a mid-80’s pop duo is unlikely. My personal suspicion is that he will appear as one of those “security consultants” on daytime talk shows about how to prevent your children from triggering some hidden bathroom sex code every time they have to go pee at the Decatur IHOP.