March 2005

Where the heck are your pants?

Matt

So I was walking through the grocery store today, and I ran across one of those fitness magazines. It had a picture of a thin, busty, blond-haired woman wearing what I assumed was one of those harnesses that Himalayan explorers wear so that they don’t fall off of mountains. Of course, mountaineers also wear things like parkas and, well, pants, while this woman had nothing else but what the good Lord (and likely a whole platoon of plastic surgeons) gave her. I must confess my eyes lingered a moment (forgive me), but what also caught my attention was written in large type over the magazine’s title: “For Women!”.

It is not a new observation that most modern magazines, targeted for either sex, feature pictures of scantily-clad women, presumably because men like them and women want to be them. While in recent years we men have made significant steps to close the unhealthy-body-image gap (did you know there’s now skin moisturizer for men? Seriously, if I wanted to moisturize I’d go to the friggin’ pool), women still bear the brunt of societal pressure to live up to some impossibly high standard of beauty. It’s a little disturbing that since we all, men and women, are collectively obsessed with these kind of images of female “beauty”, we need extra instructions to determine which magazines are for whom.

Stop asking me that!

Matt

As my roommate has already mentioned, a certain pizza establishment in town (Buck’s Pizza) accidentally put our telephone number instead of their own (244-7492) in their advertisement in the 2005 phone book.

Interestingly, what’s most annoying thing about it is not that people call at ungodly hours of the night looking for pizza. No, the most annoying part is that every single person who calls and is corrected (it’s 244-7492) asks some variant of the following: “Wow, that must be really irritating, isn’t it?”. Yes. Yes it is. Please stop asking me that.

We love you, spider

Matt

I think spider plants are a wonderful object lesson about forgiveness. Two of them live on the windowsill of my bedroom. One, Addercop, technically belongs to my roommate, but was entrusted to me under the (questionable) premise that I would take good care of it. The other is Shelob, one of Addercop’s offspring. Addercop is pretty big, with leaves of a foot or longer, while Shelob is still pretty puny.

Now, here’s the thing. I’m not really the kind of person that should be in charge of plants. I’m not really the kind of person that should be entrusted with the care of any object smaller than, say, a breadbox. I’m much too ADD. Any object that size or smaller is going to get lost, broken, or neglected sooner or later.

So as you might guess, until this morning, Addercop and Shelob hadn’t been watered in months. They were both drooping limply out of their pots, a dead brown slowly creeping up their leaves from the tips. A lot of leaves on both plants were completely withered away, leaving poor little Shelob pretty close to the end. If they had any motor skills at all, they’d probably act out melodramatic death scenes (“o, I am slain!”) or try to kill me with tiny papercuts for leaving them to starve to death.

But now, a few hours after their first watering of 2005, they’re already up off the mat. Addercop’s pushed his leaves up several inches and Shelob’s still got some green left in him. No matter how long or how often I abandon them, if I give them a little love, they respond. Who woulda thought a plant could be a Christ figure?