If You Belonged Here

Boys Will Put You on a Pedestal

...So They Can Look up Your Skirt.

I just finished reading this wise little book written by a dad, Philip Van Munching, to teenage girls everywhere. The title put me in mind of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. Somehow the titles being so similar in style tricked me into thinking the two books would have other snarky-style traits in common. They don't.

Boys Will Put You on a Pedestal is completely sincere. Overwhelmingly sincere. The kind of sincere that buys nine-year-old girls Shirley Temples at weddings and never once let's on that it's a baby drink no adult woman would ever order. Impossibly sincere.

The advice is good, paternal, and avoids being condescending, which is probably harder to do than it sounds. My favorite gems include:

Make glorious mistakes.
You are so much more than your stuff.
You can change course when the need or the mood arises.
Think about your body in terms of what you want it to DO.
In some ways, your choices about boys tell us more about you than anything else.
Always consider the source.

Philip Van Munching admits that he doesn't understand teenage girls anymore today than he did when he was a teenage boy but luckily for his daughters, he really understands teenage boys. He also understands that some truths are universal: karma is not magic, just common sense; labels are for jeans, not people; and some emotions, like grief, can't be wrapped up with a bow and a few meaningful phrases the way they are on TV. Happiness is not an achievement but a way of being.

I like this dad. If you know a girl who could use some fatherly advice from someone besides her own father, Boys Will Put You on a Pedestal is a good place to start.

PP

This isn't the Left Bank in Paris

And we aren't the Lost Generation. Although we like to pretend we are. After all we had Kurt Cobain. Or he had us. I'm still not sure about that.

But we are hardly uncivilized.

We have Oprah. We know when we are being politically correct, although usually we're not. But at least we know enough to raise our eyebrows and laugh at ourselves. We know to look a little sheepish. And we have Starbucks. Sometimes three times a day. On every corner. We really have Starbucks.

We are completely civilized.

Except that some of us have regressed to only eating organic whole foods. Not as modern and civilized as, say, a Twinkie but somehow I don't think avoiding artificial sweetners counts as devolving.

We are not the Lost Generation.

We are the GPS generation. We can give you our longitude and latitude on any given day of the year. Cell-phone tower triangulation is more than just good signal. We know where we've been, where you've been, and where they've been, and can make a pretty good guess as to where it's all going.

We are so not lost.

We do not feel helpless. On the contrary, we truly believe we can save the whales, solve the hole in the ozone, and bring peace to the Middle East. We just have to try a little harder. We have to tune in to the universe and harness our collective spirit. At the very least, we need to recycle. Recycling is very civilized.

I even rinse my plastic before I put it out to the curb. Even the water bottles. Okay, I'm lying about the water bottles. But you can see where I'm going with this.

We discuss. We debate. We compromise. We try not to blow stuff up unless we really, really have to. And even then we use SMART bombs. Seriously. And GPS. Always GPS.

Which is why I am so sure this is not the Left Bank in Paris. I tried googling those coordinates for you but I came up empty. I could have tried harder but let's face it, neither of us was headed to Paris this week anyway. We're both staying right where we are. In front of our computers. You can't get lost if you don't go anywhere.

Besides, I'm pretty sure you can't get there from here anyway.

PP

House, Tempe, and Grissom--The Rise of the INTJ

"People had to listen to him because he was right." That's why House became a doctor, because in medicine being right is the ultimate trump card. Forget what other people want, or need, or think is fair, when you're right on matters of life and death, people are forced to get down to business. There are no committees, no fact-finding missions, no focus groups, no consensus. Just right and wrong, logic and certain death.

You don't have to be nice in medicine when you know how to be right. So what if you have no bedside manner and no one sends you a thank you card, you weren't waiting around for one anyway. Not everyone helps people because they get a warm fuzzy. Some people are just doing their job. Some people are looking for a challenge, not a personal connection. And some people just like being right.

I decided a long time ago that I wasn't in the market to help anyone. If helping someone comes as a byproduct of what I do, then fine. So be it. But that will never be my goal. Because most people don't want to be helped. They want to complain. Solving their problems would leave them with nothing to talk about. I would never be so thoughtless. (There is irony in that last sentence, if you care to explore the double entendre of thoughtless).

A long, long time ago, when I was still a kinder-Poppins, I thought that the right advice, the right intention, would make the world a place of perfect harmony. Then I began to discover that their were other personality types. Up until then, I thought the world was populated with INTJs who had varying levels of insight, relevant information, and discipline. I thought INTJness could and should be everyone's goal: be independent; seek to improve; think, dammit, think before you act; do the right thing.

Imagine my surprise when I found that so many people hate INTJs for the very reasons that we like ourselves. Of course, I choose to believe that's more a reflection of them than me. I once told my mama that sometimes when people dislike you, depending on the person and the reason, it can actually be kind of an unintended compliment.

I am hoping that House, Tempe, Grissom, and the many other compelling, rational, detached, introverts who are populating some of the best shows on televisions, will make INTJs more likable, or at least forgivable and intriguing.

Because really? Sometimes being right is cold comfort.

PP