Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

So, in response to that school in Mississippi canceling the prom because a lesbian couple wanted to go, at least one blog is collecting prom pictures from lesbian couples. Theoretically, this should prove the world won't end if girls dance with girls, but I don't think the school board's going to read it.

But D'AWWW! So cute.

Also, it makes me wonder, which would be more culturally subversive, two girls going, and one wearing a tux, the "male" uniform, or both going in dresses? (At least one couple both went in suits, I think they win.)

Tonight, I drove out past Dulles airport, because we had some time to kill before meeting my girlfriend's friend who was flying in.

Something about the whole area out there didn't feel right. Strip malls and developments abounded, of course. Just plopped down randomly in places just because. Giant overpasses and confusing messes of roads. And Dulles Town Center, this giant fancy mall, was the same.

Part of it might have been the hour. It was late, and not very many people were around. But part of it was design. The mall was designed not for people, but for crowds. So without the crowds, it felt empty. Pieces of it were designed to remind you of things like old train stations, or temples, or something I guess, but none of it was designed to live in. It was just built as a temple to consumerism, or a castle, surrounded by a moat of steaming asphalt.

It, like the rest of everything else out there, wasn't designed for people. It was designed for cars. Everything is scaled to cars, not humans. I think that's part of it.

And part of it might be it all feels like a rotting mask, because it's not sustainable. I don't mean it in some kind of new-agey sense, I mean it in the literal sense of this can't go on. And what can't go on, won't. But it'll hang on a lot longer than you think it will.

Maybe the desperation was what I felt. THe retail stores, desperately waving their hole card of Christmas, trying to spur people into spending still more money they don't have. All the overpriced stuff we don't need, that marketers spend their days trying to convince us we can't do without. The baby trees and the old fashioned wooden benches scattered amidst parking lots, desperately trying to pretend to be a park...

Or maybe it's none of those. Maybe it's just me being tired, and being elitist or something. Or maybe the overwhelming attempts to make things seem fancy kicked in my latent anarchist feelings.

I don't know. This is why I probably shouldn't blog at 2 in the morning.

We went out to dinner for my grandfather's 90th birthday today. We got dinner at a Bonefish Grill, the food was excellent and a good time was had by all.

Well, mostly a good time. There were a couple moments where I was uncomfortable. Not because of anything that happened, but because of the place. The Bonefish Grill is a relatively fancy place and expensive place. Not the kind of place that rich people go, but the kind of place designed to feel fancy and expensive while still being within the price range of middle and upper-middle class people. What made me uncomfortable though, were the servers. They were dressed in those weird chef shirts with the big flap across that buttons down the one side, and had obviously been taught all the stuff about how to present wine and so on. They felt too much like servants. Especially since I could tell they were just regular people, including a bunch who were obviously college students, like people I'm around every day.

I'm not comfortable around the trappings of wealth. And servants are one of the most blatant trappings of wealth. Servants just feel wrong. I guess it's kinda weird since I don't really have problems with the servers at other places, but there it's just somebody doing a crappy job for tips. Which it is at Bonefish, I'm sure, but there they're required to pretend more, and the tips are (normally) better. But that same appearance of wealth that is a lot of what you pay for somewhere like that is what made me uncomfortable.

It's not just servants, though. Other things do too. Mostly things in the sense of physical things like one would buy. I don't object to nice stuff, but nice stuff, to me, is stuff that does what it's supposed to do well. Looking nice is a bonus, but it's designed to be used and if it gets used, it's going to get worn and nicked and stuff like that. And that I don't have any problem with. In fact, a while back, I realized it's better in almost every way to spend more for the thing that will work and hold up better than to spend less on the cheap thing that'll break and need to be replaced soon. It's cheaper in the long run, and you get better use out of it. But stuff that's fancy just for the sake of fancy makes me uncomfortable. Things that are too nice to be used for their intended purpose. Sometimes, I'm afraid I'd break them, sometimes it's just the ostentatious display of something that's fancier just to show how fancy and expensive it is, and sometimes it's because I feel like breaking the pointlessly fancy things because they're pointlessly fancy.

I think the fundamental thing here is difference. Servants, pointlessly fancy gear, those are the standard trappings of aristocracy. And the fundamental claim of aristocracy is the aristocrats are different than everybody else. Better than everybody else. And that's completely wrong, and completely against most of the fundamental things I believe.

Now, the thing is, I know this is dumb. Wealth has been at least partially decoupled from the whole idea of aristocracy. That's a good thing. And any trappings of wealth that can be bought for the price of an expensive meal aren't that much about wealth. But it's not even that. The trappings of wealth are just that, trappings. They're just surface things, and getting distracted by the surface things is dumb.

But that still doesn't mean I'm comfortable with that kind of stuff, because that's not the kind of stuff I want. And that I guess, makes sense. If it's not something I want, why should I be happy to get it?

One of the most frustrating things, to me, about a lot of the problems the world has is they're so unnecessary. Not even getting into social problems, lots of environmental problems happen just because we as a society are too damn lazy to do things right in the first place. That extra two cents a unit for making something out of craptacular materials instead of non-toxic ones. Or hell, just inertia, 'cause that's the way it's always been done, when it's just as easy and cheap to do it a better way. And the "cheaper" ways are often more expensive, because they involve using all new stuff, instead of taking apart the things we already made before and reusing them.

Feh.

In my Arabic class, most everybody is your general Generic American College Student. A bunch of the other people are first or second generation kids of immigrants, but they were either born or grew up here in the US. So they're not very different from me.

But that makes sense. It's a self-selected group, sort of. I mean, they've got enough money to go to community college at least, and they don't already speak Arabic, so it's not like it's a class recent immigrants are going to take. So it's going to mostly be a fairly similar group of people, speaking on socio-economic levels. Which just adds more evidence to my thoughts that in a lot of ways, class matters more than race in the US these days, though the two are often intertwined.

Buy Nothing Day is November 25th.

Is there really any good reason to go shopping? Just sit back, hang with your friends and family, and boggle over the people who would risk death by trampleation just to get a DVD player for $30 at Wal-Mart. 'Cause, seriously, what the hell?

(Of course, I may be a corporate sellout and end up having to work a couple of days that day, I wonder how well saying "Y'know, I can't come in after all, I realized that encouraging pointless consumerism is against my religion, and this is one of our most sacred holidays." would fly with the managers.)