Here’s my question: why doesn’t everyone go to Elmhurst for Spring Break? Maybe it’s because it’s 45° if we’re lucky and today it spit rain on us everywhere we went. Maybe it’s because not everyone has a free place to stay in Elmhurst. Maybe it’s because not everyone lives within three hours driving distance. Maybe not everyone makes Spring Break plans based on crappy weather, cheapness, and proximity so as to make Spring Break less a reenactment of Girls Gone Wild and more a low-key long weekend of avoiding the sun, shopping but not buying anything, sleeping on the floor, and writing blog posts while watching the Oscars (it’s so meta!). You can’t do that stuff at home, you know.

We’re leaving Tuesday so I’ll actually be at home grading papers and watching the Big Ten tournament for most of Spring Break. I just wanted to say that it’s nice to get out of town sometimes. Last year was sort of an off year for the crew at the Cave of Dullness, and since last year’s Spring Break, Sachen and I have only had hospital-sponsored vacations. While we’re still paying for those, we’re not really comfortable counting them as real vacations. You may be shocked to learn that Sachen didn’t make the trip to Elmhurst with us; he was actually content to stay with my parents, where he will continue to be spoiled in the manner to which he is accustomed.

I almost hesitate to publish this post about Elmhurst being the perfect Spring Break destination because I want to keep it as my secret spot, but this is the last year I’ll be spending Spring Break here anyway. No, I’m not getting out of the college-teaching racket. Spring Break will likely always be part of my life, but my free place to stay in Elmhurst won’t be here anymore. That brings me to the real purpose of this post. Internet, I’m looking for a new place to vacation, and by “vacation,” I of course mean that I want to spend no more than four hours on the road (each way) to get to a place where I need hardly any money and get to hang with super-cool and super-smart people but there isn’t much to do because I like to do nothing—if you need proof, just read this post.

I like Taylor Swift. Let’s just get that out of the way. I know I’m not exactly part of her target demographic, but I like the idea that she is a role model for those oh-so-impressionable 10 to 17 year old girls. Taylor is fresh; she doesn’t look all used up already like the other artists whose music gets played by tweens and teens alike, regardless of whether or not they are the intended audience. Maybe that is Taylor’s secret. She knows that 14-year-olds are listening to her music. Plus, she is confident without being cocky. She stands on her own two feet but isn’t afraid to take her mom on tour with her. She is, after all, only 19. Lindsay Lohan was 19 just four years ago, though, and it didn’t look like this:

All of the good stuff about Taylor Swift’s position as a role model for adolescent girls makes what I’ve noticed particularly problematic. There is a song on her most recent album, Fearless, that makes me cringe. Now, I know a lot of people who think Taylor’s singing is cringe-worthy. I’m not here to talk about her musical abilities. Even if I wanted to judge that, I have no education or talent to use as a basis for such a critique. No, what I want to talk about is feminism.

What? You’re surprised?

This song, called “The Way I Loved You,” bothers me on two levels. First, its more benign offense is that it’s all gender stereotypey:

He respects my space
And never makes me wait
And he calls exactly when he says he will.
He’s close to my mother
Talks business with my father.
He’s charming and endearing
And I’m comfortable.

The issue here is obvious. Why can’t the boy talk business with Taylor’s mom and why can’t he be “close to” her dad?

However, the more damaging problem in “The Way I Loved You” is that the song is perpetuating the romanticization of emotionally abusive relationships that pervades teen culture. (Twilight, anyone?) Take, for instance, the chorus:

But I miss screamin’ and fightin’ and kissin’ in the rain
And it’s 2am and I’m cursin’ your name.
You’re so in love that you act insane
And that’s the way I loved you.
Breakin’ down and comin’ undone
It’s a roller coaster kinda rush.
And I never knew I could feel that much.
And that’s the way I loved you.

Even though the nice boy gets along with Taylor’s parents and makes her feel “fine,” Taylor longs for the one who makes her cry and scream and lose sleep and, in short, feel bad. For one thing, at any age but especially at Taylor’s age, there is no reason to limit our choices to “fine” and “awful.” It’s OK to be alone. What bothers me more, though, is the notion that in order to experience real love, we must be somewhat miserable. Why does love so often get conflated with emotional dysfunction? Why aren’t there representations of passion and intensity that don’t involve screaming and crying? Passion doesn’t always involve crying, and intensity needn’t yield screaming fights. Like fat, there is good passion and bad passion. I wish there was some place in pop culture that showcased the difference so young girls could learn to examine their relationships.

“The Way I Loved You” is not representative of Taylor’s songs. Most of them are lighter and less dire. Maybe I shouldn’t be so concerned about this anomaly, but while it doesn’t represent Taylor Swift’s typical output, it does reflect a common trend among pop culture genres (movies, books, music, TV shows, etc.) aimed at teenage girls. Taylor happens to be pretty much the only artist in that niche that I can stand for more than 30 seconds so this particular song has become the springboard for this particular discussion.

Usually, I take a long time to process things. This goes for music, movies, and especially TV shows. It takes awhile for me to know how I feel and then some more time for those feelings to turn into something that can be articulated and explained. Sometimes I never get to that point, and I just blog anyway. (And I thank you all for jumping into that particular deep end with me.) I want to try something new with Parenthood, though, so here is my gut reaction.

First, I have in many ways been waiting for Parenthood since 2007, when Gilmore Girls ended. Of course, Maura Tierney was originally attached to Parenthood, and while I felt bad when she had to drop out because I like her and wish her well, I was nothing short of overjoyed when Lauren Graham became the benefactor of Maura Tierney’s misfortune. You see, while I like Maura Tierney, I LOVE Lauren Graham.

So I was all set to like Parenthood. Really, the show couldn’t have manufactured a better audience than me. In addition to Lauren Graham, there’s Peter Krause (from two of my all-time favorite shows, Sports Night and Six Feet Under) and Ron Howard, who directed the movie that the show is based on (which I haven’t seen) and who brought us Arrested Development, another of my all-time favorite shows.

That said, we may have a Private Practice situation here: all potential, no delivery.

As I told someone on Twitter last night, Parenthood was pretty much a women’s studies fail. Characters who are all straight, white, and middle class is so 1990s, NBC. On top of that, the only female character with any kind of a job is a workaholic lawyer whose can’t juggle her career with being a parent and is therefore letting the latter role slide.

When I wasn’t distracted by my feminist agenda, Parenthood was constantly reminding me of other, better shows. It was like Brothers & Sisters, but without the gay brother. And then it was kind of like a dramatic version of Modern Family, but without—you guessed it—a gay brother.

The most troubling thing about Parenthood, though, was that it was mostly boring. Now, I’m a student of television, and I know that pilots are notoriously awkward. With the Maura Tierney issue causing some last minute rearranging, I am willing to cut Parenthood a lot of slack. Plus, it has Lauren Graham, and I’m nothing if not a sucker for Lauren Graham.

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching an episode of Law & Order: SVU that reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for awhile. It doesn’t really matter which episode because this theme comes up so often it should be tired. For me, its relevance keeps it from being tired. (Plus, I’m just a total sucker for Olivia Benson.) In this particular episode, there’s a teenage girl who wants to have sex so badly that she utilizes a cell phone app called Anonymous Quickie (please tell me such a thing doesn’t really exist) and arranges to have said sex in a public park with a complete stranger. Of course, this scenario has SVU’s trademark blend of the contrived and the icky, but at the heart of the thing, there is something that feels painfully real. Do young women really crave sex like this or do they crave something else that they have mistaken for sex?

It has been some years since I was a teenage girl, but not so long that I don’t remember. I don’t suppose it would shock y’all if I confess that I was not the Anonymous Quickie kind of teenage girl. My life consisted of books, writing, and marching band. I had a boyfriend (some of my readers will recall that I had several but surely we can agree that there was just one significant boyfriend), but it was more about a certain kind of friendship than anything else.

If women’s studies teaches us anything, it teaches us that there is not one singular way to be anything so I’m not putting up my own experience as a standard of any kind. Therefore I now find myself in a unique position because I am genuinely, academically and personally, interested in the sex lives of teenage girls but find myself experientially disadvantaged.

Consider this situation on General Hospital as a counter for the Anonymous Quickie girl on SVU. Kristina’s boyfriend Kiefer wants to have sex, but Kristina doesn’t. Kristina is fifteen or sixteen (these things are not always clear on the soaps) and wants desperately to be older and for Kiefer to remain her boyfriend so she gets some birth control and does the deed. It has been months since that first time and it just keeps getting more clear that Kristina isn’t ready for the kind of relationship she agreed to with Kiefer. She hesitates. She cries. This is the way we’re used to thinking about teenage girls having sex, right? They do it because of pressure from their boyfriends, not because they really want to.

Both versions of the sexually active teenager are problematic to me. The problem with the SVU version is that the girl thinks she is empowered, that she wants sex and gets it instead of just letting sex happen to her. The problem with the GH version is that it’s the same old story of boys-will-be-boys and we’ve got to teach our girls to resist them. On the surface, it seems like the girls in the first version are controlling their sexuality, but aren’t they victims of a culture that presents sex as the answer to an unnamed problem? Is it low self-esteem? Restlessness? Boredom? Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like sexual desire to me.

I’ll be honest and admit that I tend to fall on the no-sex side of the teenage-sex debate for all the reasons that your mom does. I think sixteen-year-olds aren’t mature enough to handle sex, but mostly I don’t know why everyone is always in such a hurry. I feel the same way about people who want to get a bachelor’s degree in less than four years. “Slow down, you crazy child. You’re so ambitious for a juvenile. But then if you’re so smart, tell me why are you still so afraid…” I know, right? Let me qualify the mom comparison. I do not support abstinence-only ideologies, and I do believe that schools need more comprehensive sex education programs. I’m glad it isn’t my job to figure out what that would entail, though.

I think that the best thing we can do for our teenagers—girls and boys—is teach them to articulate their feelings. I’m not just talking about emotions but intellectual ideas as well. There is nothing more valuable than the ability to explain yourself. That in and of itself could go a long way toward unpacking the issue of teenage sexuality. I know that kids mature at startlingly different rates, but we might be surprised at how often what manifests itself as sexual doesn’t actually have anything to do with sex.

I need to talk to someone about Private Practice, but I’m certain that with the possible exception of Kate Walsh’s mom, I am the only person still watching this show.

You see, I suspect it might be the worst show on television right now. It isn’t that it is categorically more unappealing than Two and a Half Men or more patently anti-feminist than Cougar Town. It’s that Private Practice has so much wasted potential that all the other bad shows never had. I don’t know if it was always this bad and I just never noticed, but I suspect it has gotten worse. Of course, it still has Kate Walsh, which is why I ever watched it in the first place.

This brings me to my explanation for why I am still watching this show. I believe in Kate Walsh. I believe in her hotness, and I believe in her talent. Is she Meryl Streep? No, but she doesn’t need to be. Let Meryl Streep be Meryl Streep. What Kate Walsh has is that special blend of likability and uniqueness that makes an actor perfect for TV.

Really, Private Practice has all the stuff that makes for a decent what we used to call “primetime soap.” Are we still using that term? I’m talking about Dallas and Dynasty and my beloved Melrose Place (which I’m starting to suspect I liked only because I was sixteen and it was all “quelle scandal” every thirty seconds on that show). These are grownup night soaps, not teen-geared shows like The O.C. and Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl. That genre seems alive and well, but I fear the other is dead or dying. Part of the problem is that Private Practice is packaged as a medical drama. It doesn’t even know it is a night soap. So, we’ve got a show that takes itself too seriously because it thinks it is one kind of show when it is really another kind of show entirely.

One of the reasons that Private Practice takes itself too seriously is that it is full of the aforementioned potential. Audra MacDonald and Taye Diggs are from Broadway, for cryin’ out loud. Broadway. Although the others have less impressive resumes, the failure of Private Practice isn’t the fault of the actors. It’s the characters. Seriously, who are these people? Cooper and Charlotte have been having the same fight for this entire season. Violet is obnoxiously self-involved, and it’s hard to sympathize with her because this thing she’s trying to get over, the source of her all-consuming suffering, was so over-the-top that it was worthy of only an eye roll, or maybe several eye rolls. I spent the summer trying to convince myself not to watch the new season, but I just can’t give up on Kate Walsh.

That is my truth.

It isn’t just her hotness, although that is considerable. It’s the total Kate Walsh package. It’s that she loves her cat and she isn’t afraid to gush about him on Ellen. UPDATE—Thanks to Jen, here’s the video evidence that Kate Walsh is a cat person:

I also like Kate’s voice. It’s almost raspy but not quite, and every word she says sounds thoughtful but not rehearsed.

And her legs go on for days. It just had to be said.

So, yes, the only reason I am still watching Private Practice is Kate Walsh, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the best development in this dismal season: Addison’s mom is a lesbian! Of course, what seemed like the beginning of an arc turned out to be limited to one episode. There were some echoes later. Addison’s whole way of thinking about herself and her behavior turned out to be based on a lie, and that revelation necessarily rocked her already fragile sense of self. Instead of seeking some good, honest therapy (with a stranger, not with Violet—I don’t need to explain why that wouldn’t be useful, do I?), Addison just basically cries a lot. Even Kate Walsh has taken to call her “Saddison” on Twitter. And then she continues the same self-destructive behavior by sleeping with inappropriate men in inappropriate places. Now, I’m not a prude, but this pattern is so tired. In that way, Addison is just indicative of the entire show.

That it might be mislabeled as a drama when it’s really just a soap isn’t Private Practice’s only problem. In any genre, it isn’t acceptable to present basically the same shit week after week: sex and crying and then fighting and cold silences. The characters on GH have more range of experiences and no one expects freshness from daytime. It’s as if the Private Practice writers assume they have no core audience, and there are different people watching this show every week. Rest assured that I am sufficiently embarrassed to admit that I watch this mess regularly. These people on Private Practice are supposed to be professionals at the tops of their fields, but the disparity between their professional success and their personal dysfunction is grating on my nerves. Frankly, it’s a little intellectually insulting. If I saw some evidence that a critical examination of the tension between intellectual prowess and emotional acumen was happening here, I would be happy to cut the show some slack, but if there ever was such a higher purpose, it got screwed. Pun intended.

I’ve been thinking about The L Word lately, for no particular reason, except that I’m concerned that it was the major driving force behind my motivation to blog, given that my blogging has noticeably waned since its expiration. (Get it expiration—because Jenny expired.) And then the other day I was listening to that Brandi Carlile song, “Cannonball,” and I realized that it is describes my relationship with The L Word quite well.

I may have touched on this notion before but just in case I haven’t, I’ll explain. You see, The L Word is the bad boyfriend I never had. (Forgive me my heterosexuality.) When we first met, it was all passion and intensity. I couldn’t believe a show entirely about lesbians existed in the same universe as Two and a Half Men. That initial fire carried us for a long time, and we had some good times together. I’m getting to the point where I can smile about the good times.

But I don’t have to tell y’all that we had a bad breakup. There were some rocky moments throughout our relationship, and a few knock-down-drag-out fights. Those things are predictors of a bad breakup, and even though I saw it coming, knew it was inevitable, and was basically expecting it, the breakup still hurt because I knew I was losing something that had changed my life.

The truth is that The L Word ruined me for any other TV show. I know it doesn’t deserve that dramatic of an impact on my life, but the beauty of love is that it is mysterious. People get people they don’t deserve. Love doesn’t make sense. This feels like a place to tell a story about my uncle Jim, but I’ll try to stay on topic. Whenever I watch a TV show these days, I expect at least one gay character. If you’re watching TV these days, too, you know how often my expectations are met. Going from all lesbians to no lesbians has been hard for me. I know it will get easier, but the kind of relationship The L Word and I had doesn’t ever disappear. I’m not sorry I ever loved The L Word, and I won’t apologize for the scars because, damnit, I like lesbians. Regardless of all the shit The L Word put me through and all the ways I dishonored myself by being with it, it taught me a lesson that I will never, ever forget: There should be lesbians on TV.

I’m afraid that we’ll get to the point where “Cannonball” isn’t our song anymore and instead, it’s “Call and Answer.” And then there will be an L Word movie and there I’ll be, ready to get my heart broken all over again.

If I ever wrote a self-help book, it would be called The Four-Way Stop of Life, and it would use that most enigmatic of all traffic enigmas as a metaphor for how we behave in our lives.

Take my friend Yvonne for example. She is part of the small majority of people who actually know the rules of the four-way stop, but because no one else knows or acknowledges the rules, it doesn’t matter much that Yvonne knows what people are supposed to be doing. You can imagine that Yvonne is frustrated much of the time.

Then there are the people who pull up to the four-way stop, tap their brakes, and plow ahead, regardless of what the rules are and regardless of what anyone else is doing.

I’m the one who didn’t even know it was a four-way stop until I got there. I’m looking around, trying to figure out what everyone else is going to do. I ease off the brake pedal and mosey into the intersection, press down again on the brake when other cars seem to be moseying as well. Then, I wave or someone else waves or some jackass just darts right through, and eventually I go on my way. I have escaped with my life and my car in tact, but I haven’t learned anything about what to do at a four-way stop.

Just like there are simple and complicated situations in life, there are simple and complicated four-way stops. Take those crazy ones at Jefferson Pointe. You’ve got three and four lanes going in one direction. Who can pay attention to all that at once? We just look both ways and do what we can, some of us moving more slowly than others. Sound familiar?

Last week, I was reading at Television Without Pity about a new show starring Melissa Joan Hart and Joey Lawrence and I thought to myself, I’ll at least half watch that. (Because I owe my TV chops to the ’90s and because I am nothing if not sloppily nostalgic but this post is not going to be about that. Just wait.) You see, I like TV. We have already established that it is my preferred mode of moving picture storytelling. (Books will always be my #1.) But there is a lot of TV to watch. Most of it is crap that I don’t watch at all, not even halfway. I realized when I mentally uttered that phrase about Melissa & Joey (yeah, that’s what it’s really called) that I have unwittingly organized at least my TV experience into at least two categories.

Well, I actually do three kinds of TV watching, but what I want to talk about now is how engaged I am when I watch TV on purpose (when I’m sick or severely beaten down by life, all bets are off). For instance, Mad Men is a both-eyes, full-on mental engagement kind of show. I don’t even breathe when I watch Mad Men unless there’s a commercial. This is the way I used to watch West Wing and Buffy, but with those two shows, I was afraid to miss something. With Mad Men, there is that fear of missing something, but there is also the art of the show, the way that every part of it—the way they dress, the way they move, the way they talk and what they say—fits together to form this thing that is like an amazing painting or a perfect song. No matter how many times I look at it, I am still awed. When it’s on, I can’t even think about anything else.

I don’t suppose I have to tell you that the Mad Men experience is uncommon. There are other shows that I watch intently, meaning without my computer or my phone in my hand, but if you call or text me during one of these shows, I might pause it and reply. These shows include The Good Wife, which is a new CBS drama that I have added to my DVR. (Whether or not I watch a show when it’s on or wait and watch it on my DVR has little to do with how much I like it and more to do with my schedule. During the week, I teach Monday through Thursday and that gets hairy. Friday is usually my day to decompress and catch up with my DVR.) The reason that I gave The Good Wife a shot is because I support female-led shows. The premise didn’t appeal to me initially because that ripped-from-the-headlines thing seems so Law & Order, and while I do DVR SVU, it didn’t seem like a good idea to commit an entire series to the same headline. An hour should be plenty. I am, however, especially interested in The Good Wife’s particular headline. Why do these women stay with these men? Julianna Margulies plays Alicia Florrick, whose husband is a disgraced (because of hookers and some sketchy job-related business) state’s attorney in Chicago. Right way, they hooked me with Chicago. I love Chicago. Chris Noth plays the bad husband to Margulies’s good wife, and no one integrates apologetic with entitlement quite like that guy. The whole cast is worth watching, despite or maybe because it’s mostly made up of the other people at the law firm where Alicia is a brand new associate. There’s Logan Huntzberger Matt Czuchry as what might just be a Peter Florrick in training, Christine Baranski as one of the bosses, and Josh Charles, from my beloved Sports Night (there’s another show I never expected to like so much), as the other. Also, Archie Panjabi. What can I say about this woman? For one thing, her character, Kalinda, has been the subject of much sexuality-related discussion on the internet. Is she? Isn’t she? Who knows? If there was buzz before the show, it slipped under my radar. I don’t usually say this, but I’ll still love Kalinda even if it turns out that she sleeps with men.

The kinds of shows that I half-watch are the obvious ones like General Hospital. Does anyone full-on pay attention to soaps? I’m actually watching GH right now, I think. Yep, there it is. When is that punk Kiefer going to get what he deserves, i.e. a knuckle sandwich?

I also watch The Daily Show this way, but that isn’t a dis. The Daily Show is one of my favorite parts of the day. Each Tuesday and Thursday morning, when I get to my office, I open up my laptop and watch the previous two episodes of The Daily Show while I check my email,  listen to voicemail messages, scan Twitter, and get ready for the day. I could DVR the show, but I like my routine.

I DVR most of the shows that I must watch with full engagement, and the rest I watch on Hulu, which is somewhat ironic because most of the things that deflect my attention away from whatever TV show I’m watching are internet-related: news, Twitter, email, Twitter, blogs, Twitter, Tetris (which isn’t actually the internet’s fault), etc. The internet has totally changed the way I watch TV. Because of the DVR and the internet, I almost always watch TV deliberately. I don’t just flip on the TV and channel surf. If there isn’t anything on that I had preplanned to watch, my TV isn’t on. This is even more true of Hulu. The ability to watch TV in so many different ways has made me more picky about what I do watch. The internet takes a lot of shit from people’s parents about attention spans and unhealthy communication and blah, blah, blah, but all that can be solved by increasing our awareness of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Think, make conscious decisions, and don’t watch The Bachelor. That’s my advice.

So, while I will likely watch Melissa & Joey in some way, and I do love the DVR and the internet and all my freedom, I am glad that shows like Mad Men are still possible because it’s OK to be held hostage by art for an hour or so.

I also read The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, over Winter Break. I am a huge Kingsolver fan anyway, and when I heard her talking about the book on (you guessed it) The Diane Rehm Show, I knew I had to read it as soon as possible.

I want the whole world to read this book so I hesitate to say much about it. It isn’t like any of Kingsolver’s other books, but then is The Bean Trees anything like The Poisonwood Bible? Is Animal Dreams anything like Prodigal Summer? In the way that it tells a story that is at once epic and simple, The Lacuna is like the others, but in its scope and its style, it is singular.

I’m afraid that if I tell you the coolest part of this book, it will sound cheesy so you’re going to have to remember that Barbara Kingsolver is not cheesy. You see, there is an element of what the bookstores call historical fiction in The Lacuna. Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky are all characters. The main character is entirely fictional, but these three political activists feature prominently in the story. I don’t suppose I have to tell you that I don’t read genre fiction. I almost didn’t read any Kingsolver at all because The Poisonwood Bible was so popular. The more popular a book is, the less likely I am to read it. That is how deep and short-sighted my snobbery is. I’ve never read anything that falls under the historical fiction label, but my understanding of the genre is that the books usually don’t involve Communism in the 1940s so that is what makes The Lacuna different.

Because I am so picky, I rarely read a novel that I only love, that doesn’t strike me as problematic in any way. Kingsolver gives me that each time I pick up her work, and I can’t wait until she writes another novel.

Folks, I think I’ve discovered a problem with my iPhone. Well, the issue isn’t with the device itself. It’s more like a complication related to becoming accustomed to the phone. The more I get used to my iPhone, the more I began behaving as if everyone has an iPhone.

The line between email and text message is getting very blurry. If I send you a really long text message, I am assuming that it will show up in a text bubble similar to the way messages appear in iChat. (See my previous iPhone post for a visual aid.) It does not occur to me that my long missive might show up as more than one text. Probably, it will go like this: You’ll be reading the first part of my text when the second part shows up, interrupting your reading. You have to stop and tell your phone that you don’t want to read the new text right now because you’re still reading the first text. And then you turn your head upward, toward heaven, and curse my name.

When you discover that what I need (employing a loose definition of the word) to tell you is long, complicated (indeed, it could require still a third part), and not urgent, you wonder why I didn’t just send you an email. “She has that stupid iPhone,” you say to your other friends, the ones you actually hang out with now that I can’t afford to go out because I have this new fancy phone. “She can send an email as easily as she can send a text message.”

It’s true. Texting and emailing work in nearly identical ways, and the choice between the two often proves too much for me. Sometimes I end up emailing and then texting to let the recipient know I’ve sent him/her an email. If I send an email and do not receive a reply within 30 minutes, I assume that the receiver is unconscious. Why else wouldn’t she get back to me? What other possible explanation could there be for not returning an email promptly? The point here is, of course, that I’ve adopted a totally irrational and ridiculous idea of “promptly.”

Basically, the problem is that I have become obnoxious. That I can recognize my obnoxiousness isn’t really abating it. In women’s studies, we spend a lot of time talking about the power of being able to identify the issue and give it a name. It isn’t working in this instance so the best I can hope for (after dying in my sleep, of course) is that the whole world will get iPhones and we’ll all be big giant brats in our big giant iPhone bubble.