Dear Darling Ones,

I’ve worked in marketing for the better part of twenty years. One of the side-effects is being inordinately invested in redesigns and rebranding. Also, being a sucker for good packaging.

This is kind of annoying because I long to be an anti-capitalist renegade, and not an “oh! that’s pretty I must have it” tool. Holding two diametrically-opposed opinions at the same time is one of my superpowers. Geminis represent!

Another thing about me, which has nothing to do with working in marketing and everything to do with being a bitter, jaded harpy, is I hate motivational platitudes and positive affirmations. I loathe them much the way I hate Gwen Stefani, mushrooms, and republicans.

These little bits of word vomit bandied about so freely on the internet always feel super obvious and condescending. Have they ever in the history of modern language motivated someone or made them feel better?

Maybe girl bosses who are always hustling, who wake up and slay, and who lean in have been motivated by this stuff. Not me!

I am only motivated & positively affirmed by one saying, and you should know his by now, that I have written in every journal, notebook, and planner I’ve had since 1991.

“Day time, night time, any time, things go better with rock. The only time I turn down is when I’m sleeping it off.”

Just kidding, it’s this, from e.e. cummings.

“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”

I love this because it speaks to my innate sense of being other and also can be read as kind of anti-capitalist and anti-conformist, two things that make my heart go pitter pat.

So, this brings to me why I tell my toothpaste to fuck off every night.

My beloved Tom’s of Maine recently redesigned their packaging. I was all in, because I love that shade of aqua blue and the contrast of magenta. I like the subtleness of the brand qualities that look like they were stamped on tube. What I hate, what annoys me every god damn night to my very core, is the stupid “Do a little good today” bullshit that’s given second-billing on the package behind only the corporate logo.

UGH. BARF.

Really? Really? REALLY? Do I (or anyone) really need toothpaste to remind me to be a good person. Why does my toothpaste think this is a role it should play in my life? Why is my toothpaste offering me any advice that is not related to maybe flossing more or changing my toothbrush more regularly?

The toothpaste is just one example. I’ve been attacked by cough drops and there was a time where Always maxi pads were wrapped in pithy sayings about the positivity of being a girl.

Are we so broken as a society that we look to products to positively affirm us and remind us to be good people?

Fuck.

Yes, this is exactly what I want to do with my one wild, precious life.

Bitterly yours,
Jodi

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I’m ankle-deep in Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays, which I am really enjoying despite what I’m going to say next.

I AM SO ANNOYED. Or rather I’m annoyed by a handful of paragraphs in an essay about white beauty standards, body shame, and Miley Cyrus. In these paragraphs she’s talking about a high school experience and she repeatedly refers to one kid in her class as the “too tall boy.”

What the actual fuck does that even mean? Too tall for what?

Yes, I am super sensitive about “too tall.” It triggers every single one of my defense mechanisms because by nearly every standard I am too tall too. It’s a burden that I have carried with me every day of my entire life and will continue to carry until the day I that I die. I haven’t finished the essay yet and she might reconcile that she’s talking about unruly bodies and totally judging that too tall boy for being too much of something she has deemed undesirable.

I didn’t finish the essay because I had to stop after the third reference to the “too tall boy.” It made me too angry to finish, though I will go back to it later tonight.

Here are a few trigger words guaranteed to make me think stink-eye thoughts about the writer and/or stop reading their piece altogether.

Half: especially in reference to siblings. Half-sister, half-brother, whole bunch of barf. I don’t know why writers feel the need to consistently other people like this. Nothing is more wretched than being made to feel illegitimate, less than, and that’s how I feel whenever I read this word in reference to people. I’m always unclear of what the writer is trying to telegraph about a person by pointing out they are a half-sibling or have half-siblings. Am I supposed to think something different about the half-sibling? Am I supposed to read half-sister and be think “oh, one of those.” I don’t get it.

Slutty: ugh. This one. Aside from racial slurs and the r-word, nothing will make me harshly judge a person or writer for using the word slutty. I know some women are trying to reclaim “slut” and I am not for it. However, I use bitch with reckless abandon and frequent affection, so I’m not really one who should judge, but I am anyway. Slut and slutty to me just means “woman who conducts herself in a way that I don’t approve.” Well, fuck you.

Too: knock it off when using this to describe someone, it just lets us know the writer is narrow-minded and not being very thoughtful. I type those words knowing full well that I’ve called about a million people “too” something too many time to even count. Spoiler: sometimes I’m a hypocrite. I try to be better, but I frequently fail.

Adopted: I hate this one for much the same reason I hate half. I don’t hate it when it’s used as a verb, but I loathe it when it’s used as an adjective. I think of this whenever I read about what Woody Allen did to his daughter, who is always referred to as his “adopted daughter” as if that makes a fucking difference. Again, why do so many writers feel the need to point this fact out? Does it matter in any way? What does the fact that a child is adopted have to do with anything? It’s rarely germane to the story and all it does it just signal to a reader that this person is somehow different and that difference must be recognized and noted.

I’m sure there are other words that make me cranky and quit reading, but I can’t think of them right now, so they must be triggering to a lesser degree than these big four.

The post My Specific Trigger Words appeared first on I Will Dare.

Bleh.

#1. I made the mistake of watching the dueling Fyre documentaries the same weekend a bunch of rich, entitled white boys got in the face of the Native American drummer during the same week a bunch of dudes lost their shit for a commercial that said maybe they should try to be better humans. There are no words for my exasperation or rage or disgust. We need to throw men away and start over from scratch.

#2. I really need people over the age of 25 to stop referring to songs as bops. Please. “This song is a real bop.” WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN? You can take your bop that slaps and shove it up your ass.

#3. A hill I well die on:
Yeah = Yes.
Yay = Woohoo. Right on! Super duper.

If you consistently mix up these two I will silently judge you without remorse or regret. Knock it off.

#4. There’s only 18 days left in the 200 project and in my head I act like once I reach day 200 I can never blog again and it makes me kind of sad, even though 12 minutes before I started typing this post I was whining to myself how I didn’t want to do it.

The post Day 181 of 200: A Stream-of-Consciousness Airing of Grievances appeared first on I Will Dare.

Confession 1

The downstairs bathroom only has a toilet and a sink, and they are across from each other. When you sit down to do your business you get to watch yourself do it. The architect who designed this pile or bricks should be sent to the bad place.

While looking in the mirror I decided the Tootsie Pop turtle is my animal doppelgänger. If I were wearing some sort of turtle-looking shirt you’d never be able to tell us apart.

Confession 2

I loathe “slaps” as an adjective. “That record really slaps,” makes me want to slap. People. In their faces.

Confession 3

As I’ve mentioned 400 times before, I watch an hour of Supermarket Sweep three to four times a week. What I didn’t tell you is that whenever anyone wins the $5000 in the super sweep at the end of the show I laugh because I’m so happy for them. For people who won $5000 in 1992. I also laugh when someone wins Fast Money on Family Feud.

My mom says I’m sensitive.

Confession 4

I hate people who have spent the last 8 days convincing us they’re better than the State Fair by shitting all over every thing about it and the people who go.

The post Day 39 of 200: Saturday Night Confessions appeared first on I Will Dare.

Here’s the thing I want to bitch about today: ridiculous lists.

First I know that classifying, judging, ranking art and pop culture is stupid nonsense. So shut up. But it’s fun stupid nonsense and the world is ending because giant chunks of Antarctica are going to attack us and the Racist Game Show Host Who Overthrew our Democracy is selling us to the Russians.

And yes, this is distracting me from what I should really be paying attention to like the fact that every single elected official in both parties are giant fucking cowards and it seems nobody really wants to take a chance and lead this country and it seems all anyone does is walk around wringing their hands about how this is the end times without actually doing anything.

So yes, remember in the olden days when we had Top 10 lists? And when you made these lists you had to make decisions, often tough decisions. Then “High Fidelity” came along and made it the Top 5 and the decisions were even harder and the game much more fun.

That’s all fallen by the wayside. Now it is positively quaint to find a Top 10 list, much less a Top 5. Now we’re inundated with exhaustive lists of everything. A few examples: 25 Best Albums of 2017 (So Far), 22 Best Books to Read This Summer, 100 Must-Read Books by Canadian Authors, or 34 Exciting TV Shows You Need to See This Summer.

I’m not sure what point these ridiculously long lists serve. SEO, probably. Happy publicists, definitely. Ad revenue, ideally. But they sure as hell ain’t for the reader looking to discover a new book/song/tv show, etc. Bloggers, you’re just making a list of shit based on an arbitrary categorization, frequently the date, why not put a little damn thought into it? These lists feel thoughtless, so why should I read them?

And, to be honest, I don’t. If I see 100 whosiwhatzits you should whatever I click right on by, even if it’s on a topic I’d really enjoy like 100 Books/Songs/Movies About 6’5″ Single Spinsters in MN That Ends With Happily Ever After.

Maybe it’s an attention span thing on my part and I’m annoyed that people don’t cater to my whims. Sometimes that happens. However, I think it’s more just thoughtless content barfing on the part of many writers and publications.

I miss curation. I want someone to put some thought into their wordvomit and explain why certain things made the cut, and then even more than that, I want the list to spark a lively, thoughtful discussion with people who care about such things.

I would also like a rainbow-maned unicorn to ride to my date with Paul Rudd.

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