The Weekend Eudemon
I took the afternoon off work yesterday. I read on front porch, shot baskets with my children, hung out and talked with Marie and the kids, drank beer. Very pleasant. I'm going to pay for it a little this morning. I have to go to the office to catch up on a few things, but I should be porchin' it again by 11:00, just as the temperature gets warm.
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Are you tired of two choices on the women's racks: frumpy or slutty? Help has arrived. Maverick designers are coming out with stylish-yet-modest alternatives (you know, the type of stuff you could buy back in the dark ages of the early 1990s). 1, 2. They've been successful and large retailers are beginning to pay attention. U.S. News & World Report. I enjoyed this side observation:
Wendy Shalit, author of the forthcoming Girls Gone Mild and founder of a group blog about modesty (http://blogs.modestlyyours.net), says women are "tired of the expectation that they present themselves in a sexual way. ... Girls are discovering that showing their belly button to strangers is not as empowering as they have been led to expect."
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The cover story of this issue of U.S. News deals with America's sudden saturation with caffeine. It basically says that Americans, especially kids, are drinking and imbibing way too much caffeine and not getting enough sleep. I was hoping it would address a specific issue: are energy drinks bad for you? But it didn't. It just pointed out the fundamental law of human action: pursue moderation.
It confirmed my internet research, though, that says an average cup of coffee has 100 mg of caffeine and a 9-ounce serving of Red Bull (and many other energy drinks, excepting the extreme drinks like Cocaine and Redline RTD) has less than 100 mg per serving. It also said that the caffeine in two or three cups of coffee per day isn't bad for you, so I'm assuming my consumption of two or three cans of energy drinks a week isn't going to hurt. My nephew turned me onto energy drinks about three years ago. (I thought the old were supposed to corrupt the young, not vice-versa.)
My peers look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them I buy energy drinks, but they rarely see me imbibe. I typically drink them when I'm engaged in serious work, study, or writing, times when I'm typically by myself in a room. Only my law partners and family members actually see me drinking them. In this, I'm a closet user, but I simply don't feel much need to get caffeinated-up at a cocktail party or to sit on a bar stool.
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A transgendered ________ (fill-in the blank with your Ockham-fueled choice) is running for prom king at a high school in (where else?) California (actually, it could also be Massachusetts). I'm not terribly surprised, but I did appreciate this concise definition of "transgender": It's "an umbrella term that covers all people whose outward appearance and internal identity don't match their gender at birth." So in this case, it's a girl who wants to be treated as a boy. We used to refer to such phenomenon as "butch," but I'm guessing that's not acceptable now. We use "transgender. " Polysyllabic words carry much more weight than monosyllabic, so it lends such confusion a kind of legitimacy (though I'm guessing the neologism "faggotry" to connote certain kinds of actions and thoughts wouldn't be acceptable). It's also useful that "transgender" is an "umbrella term." It cloaks and legitimizes all sorts of emotional disturbances.
