Bring back the phone!

So for lots of people, e-mailing has replaced the phone, and it's almost considered intrusive to call anyone but close friends and family at this point.

I was just e-mailing back and forth with one of my best friends, and was about to send yet another e-mail to clarify something, and then I was like: "What the hell am I doing?  Why don't I call her on the phone?"  And so I did.  And we had...a conversation.  And it was great!  It relieved the loneliness of working at home much better than typing.  I think people should e-mail and text less, and talk on the phone more.  Especially when it actually saves time (There's this assumption that you cut out some kind of unnecessary chatter by e-mailing/IMing, but I think that's exaggerated).

Talking on the phone is also cool in a romantic, retro way.  I even think people should talk on land lines more -- as much as possible.  First of all it's less potentially-carcinogenic.  Secondly there's not all that trouble with bad reception.  And thirdly, it can feel really nice to hold a good old-fashioned receiver.  I have a non-cordless phone and love it.  It's the wall-mount-option kind, and I even wish it were the big clunky desk model.

Talking on the phone more is also a way to counteract all the overproliferation of "hot" media by chilling out with a nice "cool" medium.

Of course, I'm not the only person who's said exactly this same thing: the Times is aaaallll over it (here, here).  But I think they're mainly speaking to an older audience about their work environments.  I'm talking about social phone calls, here.  We need more of them.

Cultural beauty

I'm reading the second book by Ellen Dissanake (whom I wrote about before here), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why and it, like her first book What Is Art For?, is awesome. There are a lot of ideas in it I want to blog about, and the first is something she points out in explaining how humans use art to turn something "natural" into something "cultural," thereby making it special. Something I thought was particularly interesting was what she pointed out about the art of personal beautification and adornment: that in traditional cultures, what constitutes true beauty is adherence to the culturally-mandated form of beautification:

To the Temne, the Igbo, and many other West African groups, beauty is inseparable from refinement so that it is said that a homely but well-groomed Temne woman with refined ways would be more likely to attract male attention than a fine-featured woman who appears disheveled. In such societies, beauty, like morality, comes by acquisition, and is achieved by manipulating nature: it is not a natural endowment.

This reminded me of a conversation I'd just been having with someone about how funny we thought it was that certain naturally-unattractive women will dye their hair, put on lots of makeup, dress up a certain way, and still (to us) be obviously hideous--but that to plenty of men and other women, they look attractive because of how they're done up. We discussed how we thought this was bizarre; but in fact, culturally speaking, of course it is we who are bizarre. Even though our modern culture does place value on natural beauty, it still places a great deal of value on cultural, "artificial" beauty. People really pay a lot more attention to the signification of others' appearances than they do to their actual aesthetics. And Dissanayake seems to think that this is evidence of a healthy engagement in the meaning-giving power of shared culture.

She really thinks postmodernism sucks, and that its whole aesthetic is symptomatic of our bankrupt culture: "It seems worth asking whether the confusing and unsatisfying state of art in our world has anything to do with the fact that we no longer care about important things." I guess that could apply, also, to the postmodern standard of beauty, which my friend and I have, which looks right at someone's actual body and face and judges their beauty based on that. That, culturally, is bizarre and alienated. And yet until now I unquestioningly assumed that I was "correct" to think I knew what beauty was. And I did--but not in a cultural sense. And I'm not sure I can, at this point, appreciate cultural beauty, because I'm not used to looking in that way.

Women and men

I was talking to a baby boomer the other day who in the course of our conversation referred to a contemporary of mine as a "woman."  Immediately I sensed the problem with this and felt compelled to fix it, and also to unnecessarily make my boomer friend feel uncomfortable.  So I informed her, faux-offendedly, "Um, we call them girls."

Because it's true: most unmarried/childless urban females under the age of, say, 40 refer to themselves and each other as "girls," and their male equivalents are "guys" or even "boys."  "Woman" sounds like a fat or boring person; "man" sounds like a strange, be-suited fellow.  Both are waaaaaaaay too mature-sounding for the ineffectual, directionless, adult children we feel ourselves to be, and too old-sounding for the sexy, with-it hipsters we hope we are.

And yet right after I issued my official Millennial correction, I realized that I wasn't actually so sure about it.  I'm not so sure I want to be called a "girl" anymore.  Although self-identifying as a "girl" is superficially self-affirming, since it suggests that one is cute and fun, it's starting to seem a little depressing.  After all, does it really feel good if at 26 I fall into the same category as a 5-year-old?  The problem with "girl" no longer has anything to do with feminism (see above, "boy" -- there's no double standard) -- it has to do with the issue of Millennial/Gen-Y maturity.  And as I started thinking here and a bit here even, it's maybe time we started working on that.

I'm a cautious proponent of the "fake it till you make it" strategy, so I'm going to go right ahead and start promoting the trend of females over the age of 18 calling themselves "women" again, in the hopes that this symbolic gesture will make us feel more like adults (in the best sense of the word).  And boys should be men, too.  Doesn't it all sound more exciting?  To be women and men--to know women and men?  I think it does.  It kind of casts everything into a different light, to think of things that way.  It's kind of radical--so I like it.

Is it going to become a thing, actually?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Maybe a different word will become popular.  "Lady" has had a bit of a comeback.  Maybe other slang terms will come back instead.  But I do think I see "girl" on its way out.  It's not right anymore.