Meandering Starre

As high heels continue to infiltrate the few spaces left where society doesn’t deem them necessary, such as running, there is one place I never considered high heels going–on babies’ feet. However, someone not only did imagine high heels on babies, but created a company that makes them: Heelarious. The heels are called “crib shoes” and, before you freak out, are all soft with fabric pillow-like heel (from what I can tell). The name, Heelarious, does suggest these are something of a joke, but I am not so very sure how much of it is a joke. Certainly, legitimately selling heels for babies would (I hope) cause public outcry. So, perhaps the name is their counter—“we see these soft crib shoes as a joke”–maybe even a social commentary for you feminists out there. Okay, even I doubt the later, but a feminist can hope, can’t she?

Photo: Copyright of Heelarious

Unfortunately the ironic commentary is overruled by the fact they are actually selling these pink and animal print heals, along with the occasional cowboy boot with soft spurs, and for regular price of $35-39.95. So, they are very commercial, of course. Yet another thing women have to buy to be “feminine”? But these women are 0-6 months old.

While they are not “real” heels, I do wonder how the pillow heel may impact babies as they become mobile. Certainly stepping on a pillow heel doesn’t help balance anymore (and likely less) than the wooden stack heels I own. At least these do not appear to hurt feel and the body in the ways regular heels can. They do say “Not intended for walking (heel will collapse with weight). Not intended to harm children in any way.” However, I think the harm is caused by suggesting babies should wear heels. I won’t even get into arguments about how the heel is something of a sex object and this is, arguably, sexualizing our babies.

The Daily Show’s Kristen Schaal has an interesting discussion of women’s right, heels in general, and these heels

I could rant for quite a while about how true this comic is. In stead (beyond these few words), I’ll let it speak for itself:

Do you think a woman can be as effective a President as a man?

I will not respond as I could to this lovely question asked by ABC New on their facebook account. Duh! I will not list all the women leaders and rulers that have been as, or more, successful than men. I will not go off on how one of England’s greatest ruler—who ruled during their golden age—was a woman. But it is tempting. I really could rant about this. But I need to sleep.

It is so sad this is even a question. This may be the home of the free and the land of the brave, but the need to ask this also sounds like we are the place of the sexists.

Since becoming a triathlete my husband has begun watching the televised Ironmans. I’ve watched one previously with him and today watched a bit of the Ironman Hawaii with him. For those who don’t know, the Ironman Hawaii is THE Ironman. People must qualify for it and it is the world championship

About 5 minute into my watching I made this comment “they really need a commentator who has actually done a triathlon.” I don’t even require a commentator that has done an Ironman, but any old triathlon, even a sprint. Or maybe a marathon, or some endurance event in at least one of the three areas. Something! He was clueless. He even made some rather insulting comments at few points. He does not understand why it means to be an endurance athlete and many of his comments made this clear. I got the most pissed off at this one: “sunset at the Ironman makes you ask yourself questions about why people would want to punish themselves and for so long.” Yes, the Ironman is just an exercise in masochism. Pretty soon they will come out with a line of leather Ironman gear, complete with self-flogging devices. Come on! I don’t know any endurance athlete who does it for the punishment. The reason a person does an Ironman has nothing to do with pain or punishment. It may have to do with accomplishment, meeting a goal, the endorphins, a desire to push one’s self, and much more. But not punishment. I’ve never heard anyone say “I’ve been such a bad girl/boy today so I’m going to do an Ironman. I need the punishment.”

Obviously, he has no idea of what he is talking about. Can’t NBC do better? Get one of those retired professional Ironman athletes or even your average triathlete to be the commenter. Goodness, my husband and I would be better than this commentator. Now that would be a cool job. NBC, give us a call. We’d be happy to do the commentary for the Hawaii Ironman. We may need a few weeks on location before it…

Commentary aside, it is always cool to watch these. As something of an endurance athlete and a triathlete, I can feel their pain and accomplishment and understand, to some degree, what is gong on. Plus, just watching people accomplish such a difficult race is inspiring. Chrissie Wellington, the first place woman, had never competed in an Ironman before. She won, and it was her first! This is amazing. People work for years to qualify and more years to do well. She also won her first marathon. I wish I had her genes.

[written late morning 6/1, posted 6/4, predated accordingly.]

It is always a bad sign if you have learned your “lesson of the day” before 6 am. This means two rather unfortunate things:

1. You were up before 6 am
2. Not only were you up, but you were up and moving around long enough to have something happen to you that caused you to learn the lesson

Neither of these makes for, at least in my mind, a delightful start to the day.

This is made worse if said lesson is learned while waiting in the longest airport line you have ever seen.

Here is my lesson:

The security lines at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport before 6 am suck!

My flight out this morning was at 6:00 am. The airport opens at 5 am and I got there shortly after 5. It took 5 minutes to get my ticket and check my baggage. Then I entered the very badly setup maze that leads to the first part of the security check—the id and ticket checkers. There were two main lines and three checkers. However, the way they had the dividers for the lines setup is was impossible to get in the right line if you came from the left and vice versa. This sucked because the other line was shorter. The lines seemed to be going really really slowly, but I didn’t think much of it until I got through to wait for the next stage of the process—going through the detectors. Then I realized the lines to the detectors was the longest I had ever seen. It wrapped around every which way. I then noticed there were only two lines open! It took me 35 minutes to get about halfway through the line. At this point it is 5:40. I am not through security and my flight (at a D gate) was going to leave in 20 minutes. There was a rather disgruntled traveler in front of me who spent most of this 35 minutes complaining about the situation. He pointed out all of the flight crews jumping ahead of us in line (about 10 people on crews went through). We also noticed a HUGE number of TSA employees jumping the lines and going through (at least 20 went through our line). We hoped this meant another line would soon open. But it didn’t. They had a big meeting in the back.

However, circumstances were not entirely against me. When I got halfway through the line I was standing in front of what is normally the first class line. Several TAs employees just opened this line to get the now hoards of TSA employees through. A bunch of people around me asked if they could go through and one of the guys, rather softly, said yes. Another one was less positive. Well the guy in front of me, who knew I was trying to make a 6:00 flight encouraged me to try it. And I did. Another passenger got in before me, and I watched him go though without any problems. I was relieved to also make it through. I made it to my flight on time, but without a stop at Starbucks (much required if you are in line before 6 am) or even a bathroom. But I made it.

It seems the possibility of Hilary Rodham Clinton running for president has unleashed a whole storm of the questions concerning whether America can, could, or would elect a female president. NPR today did two stories on it, one with an interview from Senator Clinton herself and another involving both expert opinion & discussion and “person on the street” quotes. Bills addresses one comment from the second one rather well in this blog entry . I found both the NPR stories fascinating, but the second one makes me incredibly sad. And angry. The story talks about, among other things, what a woman would have to do to get elected—and of course issues like hair, make-up, and clothes become an issue, as does a few things that actually might really impact how well anyone can lead a country like leadership and military experience. However, there seems to be a big concern that people will particularly not feel comfortable with a woman running a country during war. Now frankly I can see (but do not completely agree) the argument that it is good for a president to have real military experience (and preferably experience in a war), but not all male presidents have had this and our incumbent has questionable military experience and certainly didn’t fight in a war (while the most recent candidate to run against him received purple hearts for being shot in war, and he didn’t get elected). So why must we judge women on different standards? Why must, according to the second story, a woman parade her accomplishments and always wear and show her power.

But most importantly WTF hasn’t America already had a woman president? And WTF aren’t we asking this question? We think of ourselves as this forward thinking (well some of us do) country that leads the world and is the flagship of democracy. As these things, it seems only logical that we would be the first country to elect a female president. After all more than 50% of our population is female, so shouldn’t more than 50% of our political representative of all shades and especially our presidents be female? But alas, we are more backward and sexist than we will admit. And we have been beaten in leading the world and democracy in one area—having a female in our highest office. We have been beaten by People’s Republic of Tannu Tuva, Mongolia, China, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ireland, Liberia, Ecuador, Switzerland (source), India, Great Britain, Iceland, Pakistan, Myanmar (Burma, with 80% of the votes, although the military did not let her take power), Canada, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, and many more (source) and this is not counting queens and other women leaders (note that list does include prime ministers). Some of the countries that have elected women are countries that some Americans might consider “backward” and even far “beneath” the US. Yet these countries are more advanced, more modern, more forward thinking then the US and they have proven they can do something we haven’t. Frankly I think we should be embarrassed that we are asking if a female can be elected, and we should be ashamed our ourselves for not having already elected one.

Thanks to Mebbie for her post pointing out this Dove video that illustrates the ridiculousness of what models go through to be billboard photos. This video has been making the rounds of late (I also saw discussions of it on some of the professional listservs I am on).

I’d also like to point out this site that Bill sent me a while ago that I have been meaning to blog about. This site does a great job of just showing the photo editing parts of getting the cover model look.

Essentially these sites tell us females that if we want to look like a cover or billboard woman we are just fooling ourselves—the models don’t even look like that. Although I knew lots of airbrushing and retouching went into these pictures I didn’t realize how much. It’s quite shocking.

But it is also sad. Our society has such unrealistic expectations for beauty that it is unreal—literally the resulting pictures are fake. I could go into rant mode here. There is much to rant about. So many women have self-esteem problems, due in part to comparisons to women that don’t exist outside of some photo editing and makeup wizards. The beauty industry makes billions off of our desires to look like these unreal wizard creations. We spend so much extra time and money (as compared to men) trying to look good. Just think how much more successful the average career woman would be if she spent all the time it takes her in the morning to get ready and put that into her career, her life, or even back into her sleep schedule. According to an 999Today article, British women spend an hour average getting ready for work each day (and 90 minutes for a date) and men spend… can you even guess? 13 minutes! Looking at it from a bigger pictures, this means women spend 682.5 days of their working lives getting ready and men spend 212 days of their working lives. Now imagine how much more women could accomplish with all that time back.

There are so many problems with the beauty myth and resulting industry I’m just going to stop here.

Maybe we just all need our own personal airbrushers?

Having traveled to Maine and back via our fabulous air transportation system, I was reminded (through witnessing) of two of my airport pet peeves. Now I could rant about how all three of our check bags got lost and it took us 18 hours to get 2 of them, and although they setup a yesterday evening delivery for the third bag I didn’t get it until 2:30 today, but who wants to read about that?

Instead, I thought I’d point out a few things that you can do in an airport to really annoy people—or should you want to be a courteous airport citizen—two things to avoid.

1) The Escalator Stop: This is particularly bad with larger groups of people, but also annoying with a single person. Quite simply it is when a person gets off an escalator (especially down escalators) and stops, not moving out of the way. When large groups do this you are quite stuck, and if not paying attention (I was) you could actually get hurt tripping over people or the escalator. Feel free to look around and converse with your group, just do it out of the landing area for the escalator!

2) Rolly Bag Etiquette: Now the rolling bags are a fabulous invention, but people simply don’t know how to “drive them�? (it reminds me of wings at Dragon*Con. All those people wearing wings kept poking or hitting people with the wings because they were simply not used to them). Please keep in mind that you have a few extra feet behind you when moving around, especially when turning. I got hit by several people’s rolley bags when standing still. And why do these people seem to stop suddenly? It makes it much harder to avoid running into the rolley bag.

I know it’s been another large break in posts. I got a bunch planned and will try to do one a day until I get caught up, or find something better to do

Surprise. I hope I did not spoil it for you but Rent (the musical and upcoming movie) is not happy. I’ve seen the musical and listen often to the soundtrack; I know. Despite the happy fireworks, kissing, and celebrating I’ve seen in the movie previews, Rent is not happy. Perhaps the movie will depart dramatically from the musical, but somehow I doubt it (I hope not; the musical is amazing).

I’ve been rather annoyed by the TV previews for Rent because of this seemingly happy focus. I even went to the website to watch the previews there. I must admit they are not as happy (brief shot of a fight and funeral scene) but the focus seems to be on happiness. On TV especially, the previews only even briefly show Angel, a transvestite, who might be considered a “bad�? character to the generally increasingly conservative US (Angel is actually one of the most upbeat and happier characters. She is one of the rays of hope.). I really do not think the previews offer an accurate portrayal of the musical, and if the movie is anything like the musical, the previews do not offer an accurate portrayal of the movie.

Now granted Rent does have happy moments and plenty of hopeful moments, but it is not a happy show. Let’s do a quick summary of events, characters, and general “not a happy show�? trends (warning these may be spoilers, but maybe not since the movie seems to be so happy):
-It starts with two of the manic characters concerned about paying their rent
-Another character is mugged right off
-One of the characters dies
-Several characters are HIV+
-Some characters do drugs with serious negative repercussions
-The main characters get locked of their loft (evicted) by their landlord and they break back into the loft
-One character doesn’t leave his apartment for more than 6 months because he is still dealing with the suicide of a girlfriend
-One character moves away in part to escape
-And it goes on

Let me restate. Rent is not happy. Rent is amazing; Rent is powerful; Rent portrays much of the cold hard world as it really can be; Rent shows the value of friendships and chosen families. Rent may provide some hope, but Rent is not happy. If the movie ends up being happy it is not Rent.

This is part 1 of a two part blog on the Liz Phair concert. I broke the rant off into it’s own entry, especially since both parts are so long. Somehow the husband and I ended up behind a small gaggle of teenage girls. I am seriously beginning to think that the teenage girls in this area are rude, self-centered, and uncultured. A group of teenage girls ruined the 2nd act of phantom for me (they loudly ate cellophane wrapped food throughout the second act, while giggling and talking, this would be right after what one girl called “halftime�?). This group of girls at the concert who were all wearing skimpy clothes, and were perfectly groomed (and I suspect at least one had some work done on her chest). There were four of them, and one in particular, seemed to think the earth revolved around her. Here are just a few examples:
- there was this light that was on a rotation and during the rotation shinned in the audience. It hit me directly in the eye, as it did the leader of this gaggle. When the light hit my eye I put my hand up. When the light hit her eye she gasped, and gasped loud enough that we could hear her over the music (impressive since we were like five feet from the speakers). After gasping she freaked out and did various things like grabbing her friend’s head and putting it in the path of the light (like her friend wanted to be blinded instead!). She made such a big deal out of this that all the people around were staring at her. And she did this EACH time the light rotated to our direction. And each time she acted surprised and shocked. I think people who have been shot in the arm with a gun make less noise and disturbance.
- This same lovely specimen of teenagerhood later had several cell phone discussions. During one she apparently thought it was too loud (ummm concert!) and so she bent over so her head was near the floor. Now she was just inches from B. (the husband) and now her butt was so close to B. that he could have sneezed and she would have fallen over. On to her face.
- The same girls apparently think concerts are a good time to chat, as they managed to quite easily over the music.
- A few of them were text messaging people throughout the show.

In addition, they didn’t know the vast majority of Liz’s music. But the songs they did know… Liz has some really explicit music (see WHC for an example), too explicit for me to put on this blog. These girls knew those songs by heart and were belting them out. Some of these songs were almost as old as they were. Other songs, like ones off her two most recent albums, they didn’t seem to know (unless it was explicit, WHC again). Now there are things in these songs I don’t know if I knew about at their age. I can’t imagine the parents that let their kids listen to this. I know there is only so much the parents can do, but they had a parent (well a soon to be step mother) there with them! This is the same area that has issues with teaching evolution in the schools. Anyone see anything disturbing about this?