Author: nell-boeschenstein

I recently saw the documentary Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29. As I sat in the dark theater watching aging white men dissect, play-by-play, a 40-year-old Ivy League football game, I laughed and cried and wondered how the hell it was happening that this movie about something that I couldn’t care less about was sucking me in and propelling me to the edge of my seat. Afterwards, I realized it was because the movie is about what it means to be a man, or rather what it means to be a boy on the cusp of manhood. My first words out of the theater to my companion were, “Oh, I love men!”

Since then, I’ve been thinking a bit about manliness. My thinking led a (male) friend to recommend to me The Art of Manliness, a blog that, according to itself, was started when the writers became frustrated with the messages being pushed by mainstream men’s magazines (Sex! Abs! Pecs!) and saw that a more “wholesome” brand of manliness needed an outlet. The resulting blog at times makes you tilt your head and wonder, “Is this joke?” (e.g. The post “6 Lessons in Manliness from James Bond” includes the truism “How one starts the race isn’t nearly as important as how one finishes,” and makes me wonder why this applies to men specifically and not to all people in general) and at times say, “That is funny. And also true.” (e.g. In the post, “Six Holiday Style Tips for Men,” it is highly recommended that all men “Learn to overlap cotton and wool clothing appropriately.”)

It’s nothing too deep. It’s no arty documentary. But there are gems here that, if I ever have a son, I am going to scrawl on Post-Its and use as wallpaper for his room. He’ll thank me for it later.

I have written here before about the design blog Poppytalk because the site has a fabulous and whimsical eye for everything from stationary and Christmas ornaments to shelving and chairs, with a focus on items that are handmade and often organic. Well, in case you hadn’t heard, times are tough and, if you haven’t walked into a CVS recently and beheld the mandatory seasonal decorations, it’s that time of year. Of course, because times are tough, the holiday shopping I’m doing this year is on a tight budget. That doesn’t mean, however, that the gifts need to be lame or boring (Soap? Snore.), which is where Poppytalk comes in.
 
The woman behind Poppytalk also has a website called Poppytalk Handmade which, every month, presents a curated “online street market” that features “handmade and vintage goods from around the world,” and this site is my starting place this year for holiday shopping. Each month the site changes its curated theme.

For example, as I write this, the theme is Holiday and Gift Theme, but on December 15, the theme will change to “Holiday Madness and Boxing Week Sale.” Similar, but different, since the vendors will switch and there will be a new influx of inventory. The vendors include fine artists, jewelers, industrial designers and textile designers, and the prices are totally doable, even in this economy. After much hemming and hawing about what to get for whom, I’ve finally decided to concentrate my shopping in the fine art department, and to get a bunch of my favorite people pretty little prints (the site features Etsy celebrities Olive Dear, Lisa Congdon and Artstream, among others) for around $25 so that my friends can worry about the expensive part: the framing.

Like the cliché I am, the only real radio I listen to these days is NPR or WTJU. Even so, there are inevitably days at 8am when I don’t really want to be listening to Steve Inskeep or various Bach cantatas; sometimes, I just want to get up and get dressed to Levon Helm or Antony and the Johnsons or Whitney Houston or Irving Berlin…or something like Levon Helm or Antony and the Johnsons or Whitney Houston or Irving Berlin. Enter Pandora and stand at center stage.

Pandora is an online radio station with no commercials and no chitchat. Go to the site, type in the kind of music you want to hear, and the site creates a radio station it deduces you will like based on the name of the artist or song you typed. The station gets saved, and you can listen to it whenever you want; moreover, you can create as many channels as you like based on as many different songs or artists as makes you happy.

Today, a channel entitled “Odetta Radio” makes me happy; as I write this, Odetta’s obituary is on The New York Times website. I remember the first time I heard her voice. It was when I was 5 or 6 and I had a tape of Woody Guthrie covers that I listened to on my Fisher Price tape recorder every night before I went to sleep. On it, there was a recording of Odetta singing “Pastures of Plenty,” and I recall asking my mother who the singer was. My mother said, “That’s Odetta, and she’s wonderful.” My mother was right: She was and is wonderful.

I remember how, back in the day, at Charlottesville High School in Mrs. Ruffner’s ninth grade World History class, my favorite part of every week was our current events quiz. Whereas most everyone else would groan and make generally painful expressions, nine times out of 10 I aced those quizzes; nothing felt better to my nerdy little adolescent ego than being able to name where exactly in the world that week Pope John Paul II had accidentally insulted some significant cultural group.

Ever since those current events quizzes, I have been an admitted trivia geek. (My sister likes to refer to me as “Nellanerd.”) And the Internet has made being this particular brand nerd so much easier because the most random, useless facts are available now, quicker than ever (and in high definition!). One of the most nerd-enabling sites out there is without a doubt Damn Interesting, and it is, yes, damn interesting. Basically, the site publishes about two articles a week on pretty much any topic out there—past, present, or the anticipate future—that strikes the editors’ fancy. You can read articles in the order in which they are posted, chronologically, or by searching a particular word. (Example: I typed in “fingernail” and got an article entitled “Mutant Killer Seaweed of Doom.”)

Plus, nerds are the new sexy. Trust me—there was even a New York Times article chronicling the trend last spring. Just imagine it: foreplay of sweet nothings that could go a little something like, “Ooo, yeah, baby, tell me more about Herman Sörgel and his plan for hydroelectric dams across the Mediterranean! Or what about that freshwater lake underneath Antarctica? That’s hot. So, so hot…” Or so I wish.

If there is one underrated pastime in the book of life, it is that of talking about the weather. I could talk about it all day long to anyone who wanted to talk about it. The subject often gets mocked as boring, but to those weather-haters, I say, “Nay! But what could be more fascinating than the weather? Than what’s happening outside our windows?” And while the subject gets short-shaft, evidence (The Weather Channel, cable hurricane coverage) does indeed point to the fact that the weather is something of a national pastime. In fact, every morning, I get up and do my part in participating in this national pastime by checking the weather on Weather.com. I treasure those moments alone with my coffee and news of the weather around the country. I treasure them and then I get dressed.

And yet, sometimes I’m rushed. Sometimes I just need to run out the door and don’t have time to think about a tornado here or a heat wave there or an early frost over there or thunderstorms far afield. No, sometimes I just need to know whether or not to grab an umbrella as I am running out the door. That’s when I turn my browser, with no dawdling along the way, to umbrellatoday.com. My browser then directs me to a simple homepage with the words “Umbrella Today? It’s like totally the simplest weather report ever, Julie” at the top and a space below for you to type in your zip code. I then type in my zip code and within a split second there is either the word “yes” or the word “no” in huge font flashing across the screen.

For example, do I need an umbrella today? Apparently the answer is: “NO.”

The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. The question I then want to know the answer to is, how many words are 52,938 pictures worth? 52,938,000 words? I ask because as of November 12, that was how many photographs had been posted to Barack Obama’s Photostream on Flickr. The madness began on November 5 when backstage photos were published on the site by the Obama campaign showing our president-elect and his family watching the election returns. Since then, the site has been bombarded with photographs from all over the country documenting everything from the rally at which Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007 to the aftermath of the election.

The media has been overrun since the election with photographs of America as it experienced November 4; it has even been overrun with photographs of America as it has experienced the entire two-year campaign process. The Flickr site, however, is different because it is yet another piece of evidence proving the grassroots nature of the campaign. The Flickr site documents all aspects, big and small, of the movement that went into electing our 44th president. There are pictures of speeches and organizing meetings and rallies and yard signs and babies in Obama t-shirts and on and on and on.

Because there are pictures of everything Obama campaign-related, the majority of the pictures are bad or boring or mundane. Of course, there are (although I naturally didn’t look at all of them) the occasional moving and beautiful shots, and those are fun to find—like treasures at the flea market. But what’s really cool about the site is the pure volume of its contents. It’s simply overwhelming.

I’ll be honest: I am writing this thing the day after the election and I can’t concentrate. All I want to do is read the news and look at all the pictures from around the world of all the happy people and just revel in this moment, which really is, just, wow. While I realize that by the time this column gets printed, some of the ecstatic elation we are currently experiencing will have worn off and settled into a calmer sense of happiness, it seems wrong in this moment to even try writing about something that doesn’t have to do with President Barack Obama.

So if, a week from now, you are already feeling nostalgic for the feeling you felt on the morning of November 5, I suggest you turn your browser to a website that has gotten a lot of play in the past month: Yes We Can (Hold Babies), and look at the many pictures on the site of Obama working the under-5 demographic. Right now, the photograph that inspired the website—a photograph of Barack Obama holding and hugging, with his eyes closed, a beaming young black boy—has been reposted along with the caption “I think this is how we all feel right now.” I couldn’t agree more.  In this photograph is, just as the caption says, so much joy and hope and love; it sums up the feelings of our country right now. I could look at it for hours.

The site is funny, yes, playing as it does on the time-worn cliché of politicians connecting with the people through babies. But this site is more than that. Scrolling through it, looking at the faces of these kids, you see the next generation of voters, the children we placed our votes for yesterday. And that is hardly a cliché; that’s life, baby.

Despite the fact that words are one of the things I am supposed to be good at (a conclusion that might have been made by process of elimination due to the fact that I am certainly no good at numbers), I have never had a mind for word games. Scrabble, puns, riddles, crossword puzzles, Boggle, that game where you think of fake definitions for fancy words, you get the point: I’ve never been able to master these things. That does not mean, however, that I don’t enjoy such games, that I don’t enjoy feeling spectacularly inadequate and tongue-tied. I do! Don’t ask me why; it probably has some deep-seated psychological origin that I would rather not explore.

In lieu of self-exploration, I intend to just spend the morning, afternoon, and perhaps even some of the evening hours at the One Word website trying to write something worth reading given the inspiration of a single word. It’s a really clever concept: Go to One Word and the site will give you a single word to write about. You then have one minute to write anything you want given that word and, at the end of the minute, you can submit what you have written to the site. The site then posts what you have written along with the often hundreds of things that other people from all over the world have written about that single word as well.

Be warned, however: This is addictive. If you are anything like me, you will read what other people have written, think they have written something better than what you have written, and will then feel compelled to try again to better this anonymous competition. This process can go on indefinitely. It could, theoretically, go on for a lifetime.

The holiday season is fast approaching. This means one thing: The annual time to feel the pressure to say the things you feel in your heart to the people you care about is upon you. Soon, a stroll through the cards aisles of CVS or Hallmark or Harris Teeter—a stroll that might, at other times of the year, leave you unmoved—will now leave you feeling warm and full of holiday cheer. Or not. There’s always the rare possibility that you (weirdo) don’t enjoy canned, mass-produced holiday wishes, that you have other things to say via greeting card to the people in your life.

If this is the case, I suggest that you visit Someecards (“When you care enough to hit send”). If sentiments about the impending holiday season are not what is on your mind, then these cards might express the sentiments that are. To wit: “Since everyone’s dressing as Sarah Palin for Halloween, you should go as her developmentally disabled political prop baby.” Or, “Best of luck suppressing your last-minute latent racism at the voting booth.” Or, “Let’s pray for no giant animal balloon tragedies at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.” Or, “I can’t wait to catch up with you during halftime.” Or, “My parents will be here soon.”

Really, these cards are transcriptions of our innermost thoughts, what we are really thinking, a reflection of that perpetual source of philosophy: Who We Are Today. I’m not being glib. Sometimes, in my more humorless, melodramatic moments, I really do think it’s come to this. That’s when, after all, I sit down at my computer, type in the e-mail addresses of my 100 closest friends (BCC-ing myself, of course) and send out a someecard that says, “I’ll be publicly sobbing for the next few weeks.”

My parents were visiting over Columbus Day weekend when the inevitable question arose. “So, Nell, have you been following the crisis on Wall Street?” my father asked. “I’ve been trying. I’ve been reading the paper but…” “But what?” “But that doesn’t mean I understand it!” My father then proceeded to summarize what I already knew from the paper but still did not understand.

I have no doubt my dad understands the crisis better than I do, but understanding is not something that can be explained. You have to do that legwork yourself. And so I asked my economist friend, whose job it is to understand these things called “global financial markets,” for help. I asked him what I should read online that would take my basic “knowing” and elevate it to at least a rudimentary level of understanding; he pointed me in the direction of The New York Times blog of the newly minted Nobel Prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman, as well as in the direction of the blog for the Times’ chief financial correspondent Floyd Norris.

But he also suggested a pretty readable blog called Calculated Risk, the writer of which is a former senior executive at a public company and who predicted the mortgage crisis and its fallout as far back as 2006, when the housing market still hadn’t begun to crumble. Lately, the guy has been posting six or seven times a day trying to keep up with the latest news of our doom, and those posts include everything from JP Morgan conference calls to clips from “The Daily Show” to Census Bureau reports to press conferences with Henry Paulson. It’s an overwhelming amount of information, especially if your basic vocabulary for the stuff is as unimpressive as mine is, but I’ve got to start somewhere and it’s going to be here.