hey pretty

Be Careful What You Wish For

Not long ago on this blog, I wished that the network powers-that-be would create a TV show about real-ish people with real-ish problems who live in real-ish homes, with real-ish jobs that they wore real-ish clothes to.

Unfortunately, somebody did.

Quarterlife is the latest situational drama from Marshall Herskovitz, creator of Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. It originated as a web program via MySpace, and recently made the leap to network TV. While I have never seen the show in its original format, I can only suspect that something was lost in its translation.

The show centers around Dylan, a woman in her mid-twenties who chronicles and commentates on the life of her circle of friends via her blog of the same name. I'll get to that part in a minute.

Dylan is beautiful. But because she has dark brown hair that she never seems to comb, and wears semi-frumpy clothing, we're probably supposed to view her as the sensitive, smart plain-Jane of the group. She works as an Editorial Associate at a women's magazine called Attitude. One day, she suggests an idea for a potential new editorial section of the magazine to her boss, who scoffs it off as a stupid idea, and then predictably pitches it as her own in an all-staff meeting not long after. Dylan is understandably incensed.

I, and I am sure many of you as well have been in similar situations at work. We pitch a great idea and it takes off, but we don't get the credit for it. That is what people in the real-world refer to as "paying your dues." Normally when this happens we complain about it to our friends over a few beers, sulk a bit and then suck it up and move on with things. We don't do is deliver a rambling, passive-aggressive speech in front of all our colleagues where we take credit for the idea in  the most inarticulate and pathetic way possible. But that's what Dylan does and her speech reclaiming the idea from her boss while complementing-but-not the woman who claimed credit for it is one of the most horrifying and cringe-inducing scenes in recent scripted television history.

I'm not sure if this effect was intentional on the part of the show, but way to go for painting mid-twenties career women as whiny, simpering, insecure know-it-alls.

As I mentioned earlier, Dylan has some friends. I can't remember any of their names, but they consist of a pretty, yet insecure actress who beds random men in an attempt to self-validate; a nice brown-haired girl who looks a little like Sarah Polley; two guys who recently graduated from film school; and a weird geeky guy who has yet to reveal his actual purpose on the show other than to fill the "wacky guy" prototype.

Of course there's a complicated love rhombus in there too. The film school guys (a meat-heady player and a sensitive artiste respectively) are both in love with the Sarah Polley look-alike. In typical TV-girl fashion, she is torn in her alliances but for now has chosen to play it safe with the meat-heady player. Meanwhile, Dylan broods over her unrequited affections for the sensitive artiste.

As I mentioned earlier, the complexities of these dynamics are documented by Dylan via her blog.

Now this is the part of the show that I take the most issue with. As anyone who has ever taken pixel to screen knows, the first rule of personal, diary-style blogging is to tread lightly when it comes to mentioning the lives of those around you. If your friends wanted the intimate details of their lives broad-casted for the world to see, they'd have their own blogs.

Predictably, Dylan's friends somehow discover her blog and temporary alienation ensues. Now, I will admit to having written some things about friends that I shouldn't have in the past.  Even the slightest criticism of a friend can be construed as a passive-aggressive snipe. I've learned my lesson and try to keep my friends out of my blog as much as possible, especially when I am having a problem with one. But nothing I have ever written comes close to Dylan's so-called revelations when she plays armchair psychologist. In assessing the issues plaguing the pretty actress girl, she writes of her tendency to sleep around and then drink too much in order to forget. Ouch.

In reality thems fighting words akin to those slambooks that were all the rage in  the 80's--likely to get you punched and then disowned as a friend. Instead the pretty girl just broods over it for a while, admits to Dylan her sexual inadequacies, downs a shot of liquor and overcomes her insecurities by singing at a bar. In other words, Dylan not only gets to be right, her passive aggression is validated.

Um, yeah.

Given the span of time in between the resolution of the writers strike and the arrival of new programming from all your favorite shows, Quarterlife seems likely to drag on for a few more episodes. I'm curious to see if it will get better.

Will Dylan learn from her mistakes at work and with her friends, or will she continue to enlighten us all with her unsolicited opinions?

Will the wacky guy reveal a purpose for himself? 10 bucks says he's in love with Dylan ala Ducky in Pretty in Pink. Or he's gay, ala Steve Zahn in Reality Bites.

Will the Sarah Polley girl stay with the meathead, go with the artiste, or choose herself ala Kelly Taylor in 90210?

Will Dylan comb her hair?

Will the actress girl grow a spine and become more sure in herself, or will the show follow TV history in punishing the slut by giving her  terrible disease?

Will I keep on watching this show for its trainwreck appeal? Probably. But like Dylan, I will hate it, and myself, just a little bit more as a result.

Is There A 12 Step Program For This?

Hello, my name is Hey Pretty and I am an addict.

My addiction is not the sort where I am compelled to buy copious pairs of shoes, gamble on slots, or eat massive amounts of ice cream. No, this addiction is of a far quirkier nature. I cannot but help to compulsively rearrange furniture.

I have been afflicted by this disease for as long as I can remember. For several years when I was a child, my mother ran her own interior design business. I came of age watching her draw up floor plans for her clients, pore over paint chips, and obsess about task lighting and slipcover fabrics. During this time it became a hobby of mine to sketch floor plans for my dream bedroom, imagine how I might somehow renovate our decaying barn into a rocking bachelorette pad, and the merits of glass bricks and those metal spiral staircases that were all the rage in the 80's. Much to my mother's chagrin, I would periodically move the furniture in my bedroom around, simply to mix things up and to experience my living space in a new way.

Since then my addiction hasn't waned. Whenever I enter another person's home, my brain immediately starts imagining where I would put my own possessions if I lived in that space. I love to visit local furniture stores such as Miss Pixies and Good Wood, simply to add new pieces to my fantasies. And I continue to periodically reconfigure my furniture arrangements.

As most of you know, I live in a group house. Here's a little more information about my living set-up. Our home is quite large and was built in the early 1900s. I live on the third and top floor (I am always attracted to the top floor of residential buildings. I like to be high up with the trees as if living in a nest.) I have two rooms. The first room I have configured as a lounge/entertaining area. It contains an old sofa concealed by a khaki colored canvas slip cover and a few handmade quilts; an antique sewing machine table; a dark wood ladder style bookcase from Crate and Barrel; and an orange leather chair purchased by my parents in the late '60s. It was designed and manufactured in Sweden and represents the groovy modernist design ethos of that period. This lounge/entertaining area is not large. It measures approximately 8'x10'. A while back I painted it a silvery-green color, and I have hung some of my favorite photographs on the walls.

Perhaps the best aspect of this room however is the 2nd floor roof that this room accesses. You have to climb over the orange chair, and out the window to get to it, but it's sort of like a balcony and I tend to sit out there in nice weather reading and smoking cigarettes. It's also a nice place to bring dates to with a couple of beers. No, I have never "gotten it on" on the roof (I get that question a lot).

From the lounge/entertaining area you enter my actual bedroom. This room measures approximately 10'x 12.5'. It has two windows, with really excellent recessed window sills. My bed sits under one of the windows, on the wall parallel to the one with the door. I use the window sill above my bed as a bedside table, and it contains an old lamp given to me by D, some candles, and a stack of whatever books I am currently reading (I am never reading just one). The room also contains a dresser and another bookcase. There is art work on  the walls of this room as well, although I really need to paint because the walls are a blah off white and are pocked by old nail holes and other manifestations of wear and tear.

As of late yesterday afternoon, there is now an old oak writing table in one corner of the room. It had been living in the third floor hallway ever since I moved in three years ago because I had always assumed it would be too large to gracefully fit into the floor plan of my bedroom. I thought wrong.

The old oak writing table came to be in this particular place out of necessity for a reliable writing area in the house. Over the past several months I had been using our dining room table for such purposes, but G, who is moving out on Saturday recently took over the entire room as a storage area for his junk, and I can no longer settle comfortably into that space. That, and I felt bad taking up so much space in a common area of the house.

I really needed a quiet, comfortable, well-lit corner in which to apply for jobs and set up my writing portfolio. Yesterday I was surveying the available space in my room and noticed that if I tweaked the floor plan just a little, I might be able to fit the writing table into that space in a graceful and efficient manner.

I hadn't arranged my furniture in over a month, so clearly I was due for another session. The last time I rearranged, I declared the end product the absolute best furniture configuration possible with the pieces currently available to me. I promised myself (and a few others) that this would be it, as the floor plan could never be improved upon and it was time I accepted that and found a new strange activity to compulse over.

But the thing with addictions is that this time is never the last time. And while I love my new set up (which reminds me a bit of a garret where a 1920's French girl might have once slaved over her poetry or her sketches) I fully admit that this probably isn't the final arrangement.

It's a commonly held belief that an organized living space is essential to creating an organized mind, a philosophy I have grudgingly come to accept over the years. I suspect that my compulsion to reorganize my living space is in part an attempt to furbish the sometimes dark interior of my own mind. Like if I can create the optimum furniture arrangement, I may open up some clogged synapses that have been preventing me from being as creative, productive, and as happy as I can be. If anything, it seems to freshen things up a bit. Nothing depresses me more than stagnation--of any kind.

There is also an aesthetic component at work here. I happen to be a very visually oriented individual. I minored in art history in college and devoted quite a bit of my studies as an English major to the interplay between visual aesthetics and literary theory.

Objects of beauty are like religious talismans to me. I like to look at things and find prettiness in them. The other day for instance, I spent a good while staring at a small section of my boyfriend's head, marveling at the many different colors of strands it housed, trying to determine the best color to describe his hair as a whole. He was so busy watching an Eric Clapton concert on You Tube that I doubt he even noticed.

And  to be honest, furniture rearranging also makes me very happy, and being very happy makes me productive. Today for example, I have already applied for two jobs and later on I intend to vacuum and run errands.

I've never been able to tell how destructive this compulsion is. I read once that re-organizing and furniture arranging are manifestations of ADD, and that doesn't surprise me.

But as long as I'm not harming myself or anyone else, I see no real problem with my obsession. I have trained myself to only do it during the day, as to not disturb others with the sounds of furniture being dragged across floors, and I am very realistic about what types of furniture I can handle without doing harm to my physical self. I always lift with my knees and never with my back, and if a task is too cumbersome, I abandon it or ask a strapping lad for help. There is always a fine assortment of such to choose from.

Should I ever live with another individual as part of a couple, I suppose this habit could be a bit annoying. I guess we'd have to live in a space that includes a small study or studio that would belong only to me, that I could rearrange at will.

Until then, I will probably continue my little obsessive hobby. At least until I find another to take its place.

In the comments section, suggest an alternative to furniture rearranging. It must be something that includes re-arranging things of aesthetic value. Then tell me about your strange hobby.

Lunch Time Poll

If, for reasons too boring and convoluted to get into, you weren't friends with somebody anymore, and they invited you to a party (via Evite), only to disinvite you later (also via Evite) what would be the appropriate course of action on your part?

A. Ignore said situation and continue original plan to not attend said party?

B. Suspend original plan to not go to said party and crash it as if the disinvite never happened?

I am inclined to say B, but I'm afraid that the irritatingly grownup thing to do is A.

It astounds me that age the age of 31, I am still compelled to wrestle with such questions. Nobody ever tells you when you're in Junior High that the social indignities of Junior High never really go away. Deep down we're all just a bunch of acne-ridden frizz-heads in pegged jeans and cable-knit sweaters from the Limited* I guess.

Jigga jigga wha...?

*Those of you who are my age will totally appreciate this reference. The rest of you, not so much I'm thinking.



In the comments section tell me what you'd do. Then tell me what your favorite 8th grade outfit was.

What You Don't Know About Non-Profits

There's a strange misconception afloat in certain circles, especially the ones populated by public relations executives, that people at non-profits don't do any work and are unqualified to work anywhere but non-profits. I know this to be the case because I have encountered several insinuations of such over the past several days.

And I'm downright sick of it.

Over the course of the five years I spent working in the non-profit sector (eight if you count temping and government contracting) I secured story placements in the Washington Post and other local media outlets; wrote a White Paper for a prominent national journal on civic issues; authored articles for publications such as the Nation; produced and drafted content for CD-ROMs that reached many thousands of users; overhauled fact sheets and on line media rooms; created speakers bureaus; and single-handedly persuaded my senior leadership team to invest tens of thousands of dollars to launch a new business initiative based around the idea of a green building website for DC homeowners.

I did other things too, like build media lists; cold-call reporters and write many, many, press releases. But the above list represents a sample of the accomplishments of which I am the most proud.

I cannot compare any of them to whatever goes in within PR agencies, because I have never worked at one. But to hear the practitioners of corporate PR talk, it's as if agency people cure cancer on a daily basis and discover cold fusion in their spare time.

Earlier today I had a telephone interview for a very corporate position. It went okay. It would have gone better if the woman on the other end of the phone hadn't constantly harped on my lack of "corporate experience." If "corporate experience" is what she was after, my resume (which clearly illustrates a history of work for non-profits and Government contractors) never should have ended up in the to-call pile. She seemed to think that my non-profit heavy work experience would be a problem dealing with "difficult personality types."

As if people at non-profits sit around all day singing Kumbya and trading love beads.

Honies, do you know anything about the non-profit sector at all?
Apparently not, because if you did, you'd know that the number one challenge affecting non-profit communicators is money. And you do know what it's like to launch communications campaigns without any?

It's not easy. And yet, all over the city at organizations both big and small, people like me manage to make it happen.

Paltry funds combined with the pressure to secure media placements often results in one thing: Difficult personalities. These difficult personalities are often harried CEOs who don't know the first thing about public relations, but who are upset that their anonymous little NGO isn't on the front page of the Washington Post.

I can't count the number of occasions I've spent dealing with the pressures exerted by such types who don't understand that their issues aren't newsworthy, who wanted said coverage 10 minutes ago and aren't taking no for an answer.

I'm sure that agency practitioners work very hard but I'm tired of their professional experience being valued over mine. It takes all kinds of thinkers to make a successful communications shop run, and the one kind of experience that may be the most beneficial may also be the kind that isn't getting the chance to show off its stuff.

In short, non-profiters are often well-rounded professionals with varied sets of experiences and significant accomplishments. It's time we had our day in the sun.

One Thing You Don't Know About Women

(In the spirit of Esquire magazine)

Women try to avoid conflict at all costs. Much of the time when we apologize and take credit for an argument, it's not really that we think you're right. You're still in the wrong, there's simply nothing we want more then for the fight to be over with.

OW

I just jammed by foot against the door of D's kitchen. There's this sharp metal hinge thing that sticks out and it sliced my toenail in half, creating an impressive amount of blood.

While logic dictates that I shouldn't be angry at him for my own inability to walk properly, I am choosing to blame this on D.

D. who is currently in Europe without me. D whose apartment I have been sitting for the last week and half. D who doesn't stock basic first aid in his house like bandages and Advil, just a collection of expired Rx medicines that will do me no good at all.

I was already feeling somewhat bitter at being left behind, and this injury is the icing on the cake for my pity party.

There's nothing like a minor injury to make one feel like a six year old again. Right now I want nothing more than for somebody to patch me up and give me a kiss on the forehead and to tell me it will all be better.

What's worse is that several minutes before I jammed my toe, I turned by body in a weird way and did something funky to my back. The reason I was in the kitchen in the first place was that I was hunting down some meds to alleviate that pain.

So now I hurt in two places. Three if you count the utter frustration induced by the whole affair. Four if you count the case of dramatics these events have obviously produced.

Goodbye daily errands. Hello rest-ice-elevation.

Signed,

Your favorite gimp (with a mangled toenail and face full of tears.)

Travel Advice Needed

I am thinking about going to Scotland. I have a friend who lives there who I can stay with for free. The only question is airplane rates. Any advice on super-cheap air fair?

Master of My Domain

Anyone out there experienced with setting up professional services websites? I decided this morning to create a website for myself to market my professional writing and content development services. Because I am officially a freelance writer, you see. I also decided that being something isn't a matter of being paid for it, per say. It's more a matter of declaring it.

I am a freelance writer.

Thank you.

Of course, there are plenty of occasions in life when declaring something most certainly does not make you that thing. For instance, I could have declared myself to be a giraffe. But at 5"2' and very much a human, no amount of declaring will ever turn me into a tall, slender animal with spotted hair and a penchant for leafy plants. A giraffe isn't in the cards.

But freelance writer is.


The decision is one that has been slowly percolating for years. Since being laid-off from my office job late last year, I have been conducting an intensive and wholly fruitless job search. I have only had two job interviews despite applying for an average of three jobs a week. Mostly my resumes and cover letters seem to disappear into the ether the second I've pressed send. I have this theory that if heaven exists, it's the place where you reunite with everything you lost over the course of your life, like socks and earring backings. You probably also reunite with all those resumes and cover letters, like some sort of representation of the detritus of your professional lives.

The thing about these jobs I've applied for is that most of them don't really appeal to me very much. To be honest, I find the practice of sitting in a beige cubical all day to be a very soul-sucking one and I'd like to find a way to not have to do it anymore. I'm not certain this will be possible, but there are certainly plenty of people who support themselves through freelance writing. My skills are just as strong as anyone else's. Perhaps better in some cases.

Seeing as how it's been a month since my last job interview, yet about a dozen people have asked me since then why I'm not taking the idea of freelancing more seriously, maybe that's a sign. Nobody is asking me why I'm not taking the LSATs, pursuing a career as a veterinarian, or becoming a line cook. They're asking about my writing, which is obviously a strength and an interest.

And it has been for as long as I can remember. I just don't know how to go about doing it.

I have been recently inspired by an old friend from the hippie summer camp I mentioned several posts ago. N was my friend for two summers. Petite, bubbly and wickedly funny, N was my first friend from NYC. She lived in a spiffy brownstone on the Upper West Side with her impossibly sophisticated family (I think her mom had some totally sick job like curator at the Met). On weekends during the school year N and her friends would roam the streets of Manhattan smoking cigarettes and looking for an empty apartment to drink beer in. Her life was a total contrast to the isolated, countrified one that had been constructed for me in rural New England. I was way envious.

N was easily the most popular girl at camp. Boys followed her around practically tripping over the chance to be friends with her. Everybody knew who she was. You'd think that a girl like that would have no interest in my circle of less fabulous (though still kick-ass of course) friends. But she lived with us for two summers, the first through random assignment and if I recall correctly, by choice the second. As dorky as this sounds, being friends with her sort of felt like an honor, especially to an awkward, shy country girl like me.

I lost track of N after I stopped attending that camp. I heard tales of her life through the post-camp grapevine for a while. Eventually I forgot to keep up and she was filed away in the back of my mind like any other childhood memory.

About a year ago I was getting a pedicure at my regular place. I always use pedicures as an excuse to catch up on my frivolous reading, so I had a big stack of fashion magazines by my side. Thumbing through one I came across an article about something--beauty treatments if I recall correctly. I read the piece, which was sharp and funny. About as good as an article on salons can be, given the limitations imposed by the subject matter. The by-line suddenly caught my eye. It was N. N had somehow managed to use her writing skills and outgoing personality to establish herself as a beauty writer. And she was good at it too. I was way envious.

Of course, since this is me we're talking about here, and I am painfully slow to take any action regarding directions of my life because I am a big ole' scairdy cat when it comes to taking risks, I promptly forgot about all this after I was finished being extremely impressed and extremely depressed. I went back to whatever day job I held at the time and continued to toil in obscurity and dissatisfaction.

I thought of N again  this morning for absolutely no reason. I was heating up a breakfast pie in the toaster oven, and that article popped back into my brain. Yet another sign. If N can do it, so can I.

Since admittedly, this is still a somewhat scary thing for me, it's not the kind of activity that I can dive right into. If I am to realize this new goal of developing and launching a lucrative (ha!) freelance career, I will need to do it in baby steps. Luckily, I still have unemployment checks to fall back on. And I will still continue to apply to office jobs, just in case.

But step one, and this brings me back to the origin of this post (don't you love how my most recent posts begin at point A, steer seemingly off-course, and then circle back to point A again?): I need to establish a website where I can provide potential clients with samples of my past work--articles; letters-to-the-editor; collateral materials. I have already purchased a domain name but I don't know what to do next. Which is where you come in.

What do I do next? I guess I need a host, right? How do I do that? Then I need to design it. Is there a WYSIWYG editor I can use? Then I need to populate and write it, and somehow get search engines to care about it, right? Anything else I'm missing?

In  the comments section, tell me how to build this thing.

Art Imitates Life, Imitates TV

"Art may imitate life
But life imitates TV"--Superhero, Ani Difranco

In the current edition of Entertainment Weekly, writer Jennifer Armstrong surveys the current landscape of post-Sex and the City television and wonders what's next.

A critique of the numerous knock-offs of SATC (Cashmere Mafia, Lipstick Jungle, Men in Trees et al), Armstrong reminds us that before SATC grew into a cloying caricature of itself, it was considered groundbreaking because it gave a serious voice to a cultural demographic that had never before been portrayed sympathetically on TV--single, urban women over the age of 30.

Armstrong goes on to posit that the current TV landscape is downright cluttered with knockoffs of the once "groundbreaking" show and wonders what group could be next in having its plights dramatized for the enjoyment of viewers.

The answer seems about as obvi as an ankle sprain caused by too many cosmos on too-high Manolo's: how about *real-seeming* people? You know, people like thee and me who can't afford 400 dollars for a pair of shoes, who wear clothes from mass merchandisers, who live either in cluttered shoe boxes of apartments or in dilapidated homes with too many roommates? People in relationships with non-dramatic everyday problems, people with an equal assortment of married and unmarried friends? People who do not hold glamorous jobs, but who fret over the petty indignities of life in middle-management? Those of us, who for however much life throws at us, things remain basically the same? People who might be reading this blog, for instance.

While I have no illusions that my life of budgeting for groceries, fretting about credit card debt, and occasionally worrying that my bf flirts with too many pretty girls may sound hopelessly boring and unworthy of dramatization, I also believe that  the realities of post-20-something life in the city is a realm of existence that has  been unsatisfyingly documented by the network powers-that-be, at least in a dramatic fashion. Sure, Seinfeld worked a bit of this magic in the 90's but even its main character was a working comedian, a gig far more glamorous than your average Joe or Jane's. And 30 Something spoke a bit to these realities back in the 80's, but via a tabula that was downright suburban.

What we need is an updated My So-Called Life set in the present day, where Angela Chase in not a high school student, but a woman in her 30's trying to navigate the world of almost-grown up Jordan Catalanos and Brian Krakows. Where the complications of her parent's marriage has ended in divorce, and where she must struggle to align her familial loyalties. Where more assured than in her teenage years, she continues to struggle with insecurities, questions of self-worth, and the ever-looming dilemma of what-she-wants-to-be-when-she-grows-up.

While such issues are occasionally illuminated by shows portraying characters in their 20's, there's an underlying message that such problems either dissolve into marital and familial bliss come the age of 30, or that by that age, one is so wealthy and fabulous that an entirely new set of problems will present themselves. As if 30 were some magical age by which the problems of one's youth are all at once resolved, or a bend in life's road somehow steers us in a new and better direction altogether.

Many of us know this not to be the case. And for those of us, there should be a TV show that is sympathetic to our mutual plight.

In the comments section pitch me an idea for a new TV show. Or tell me what you think Jordan Catalano would be up to these days.

A Public Service Announcement By Hey Pretty

Hey you! You over there on the sofa snarfing down a burger from Five Guys, going over your to-do list for your upcoming week at your *very important DC-job*, mindlessly surfing through the channels on your big-screen TV, even though we all know exactly where your attention will ultimately land--whatever the E channel's latest offering on the trials and tribulations of Brit-Brit Spears. Yeah, you.

Can I have your attention for a moment?

Thanks.

If you're anything like many of your peers, your house contains piles of books you have read, planned to read but ultimately abandoned, or have never read and simply purchased in an attempt to look more cultured and intellectual than you actually are. Real estate is expensive in this city, and your book collection is imperializing a not-insignificant portion of it.

What to do about this shameless display of tree-eating? Where to put all the new books already on queue in your Good Reads account?

You have an abundance of options. Give to a friend. Re-gift as a birthday present to your favorite used book fan. Leave in a pile on the sidewalk. Pitch neatly into a dumpster.

Good options all, but they pale in comparison to what I am about to recommend.

Give 'em to the prisoners.

Why?

Because prisoners spend their lives in cramped, confined spaces utterly isolated from the pleasures of modern day society. That's kind of the point and all, cuz they're in jail, see. And while a good lot of them have no doubt committed horrific crimes way surpassing those of what you might encounter in your typical Arlo Guthrie song, Hey Pretty is firmly committed to the notion that no matter how egregious the crime, no man or woman should ever be deprived of the right of a good education. Isn't that what prison is about? To reform the criminal? To rehabilitate the minds of so-called evil-doers so that they may be in some way fit to matriculate back into so-called polite society so that they too can enjoy a nice morning at the Dupont Farmers market and a feast of tasty breakfast pies and high-end baked goods from Bonaparte Breads? Can't very well do that without books, can they?

A dyed-in-the-wool-liberal and admitted curmudgeon through and through, I have committed a number of so-called subversive acts in my day. In high school I oh-so-generously signed my least favorite English teacher up for a two year subscription to Rolling Stone. In college I participated in the annual "Hemp Fest" in order to articulate my very passionate conviction that a certain plant be decriminalized. I've tossed uncounted sums of money towards liberal political candidates. But all of it is surpassed by the day I donated my Constitutional Law text book to the anti-prison group at Oberlin College. Perhaps it was a bit late for whatever prisoner who ultimately received the volume to learn of their own rights within our nation's legal system, but I like to think that my action contributed to the education of a great fledgling legal mind. Or at the very least, helped to illuminate for them why the landed where the did in the first place.

While everyone is entitled to their opinion regarding the merits of incarcerating those who break the law, who among us can claim that even the scariest, most heinous crime-committer doesn't deserve a little intellectual edification? If you can, you might want to retrace a few of your most recent steps because I'm afraid to inform you that you might have dropped your soul somewhere back there.

It isn't a difficult thing to do. And I am here to make it easier. No need for a Google search, even. Simply click here to find out what's what and how you can help.

In the comments section tell me about a subversive act you've committed in the past. The best story gets a free copy of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.