I hardly ever read those things, but for whatever reason I read this one. In addition to being generally boring and poorly written, for something called a "Sex Diary" with an alleged theme of how much sex the couple has it says very little about sex. I assume they published it so people could hate on the UES rich-people lifestyle it depicts, which, okay, fair enough.
Even corpses are made up before being put on public view.
It's nice that the passive voice was used here, so it works for both morticians and certain serial killers.
I'm assuming "UES" stands for 'UnEnthusiastic Sex".
If I figured out the right article (and I'm not sure I did), my reaction is entirely the opposite -- heaven protect me from the nonstop homogenization of op-ed and personal essay editors. That piece reads like a thousand other pieces in the same genre, and I guarantee you that if their writing advice were "Dictate it to your iPhone and then let a freelance copyeditor clean up the worst of the typos" you'd get a far more engaging piece with a far more authentic voice.
In conclusion, bad editors are worse than no editors.
Brandy may be a bad editor, I don't know, but she's got one of the best, sharpest, and downright funniest twitter accounts out there. Fight me.
While I admire the poised prose and studied coolness of the original post, I must confess myself both entirely ignorant of the subject under discussion and possessed of not the slightest inclination toward enlightenment.
It's when the orgasm shows up as noteworthy that wow is this an even worse nightmare than I'd thought.
(That but grammatical.) and Mossy, you should suffer too.
I don't know what we're talking about.
5: Presumably this is the article in question: https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/the-mom-who-has-sex-with-her-husband-every-night.html
I'm not Catholic, I don't have to suffer.
14: god but don't you miss out on so much that way??
I have self-inflicted Protestant suffering instead.
Just one syllable away, yet such a difference.
(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
You don't know what you're missing.
Witt, if I understand 5 correctly, are you alleging that you believe the original composition to have had engaging verve, only it was reduced to nothingness by an editor? I simply assumed it was written in the first place by someone who has no idea how to write or that writing can even have aesthetic qualities and can only reproduce the blandness she's already encountered.
Barry is of course correct that Brandy's twitter account is good.
My daughter has a school function and so I show up and mingle with the other moms. A lot of nannies wait in the back with the younger siblings. My nanny is home cleaning, which is what she does when my kids are at school.
We're having friends over for brunch. My nanny gets the house together while I get the kids and myself together. The couple coming over is great, but they're a little over the top. Very wealthy and a little obnoxious. They show up with their three kids and with two nannies. I knew they'd bring their nannies but it still feels awkward and unnecessary.
I wake up from my nap to a magically clean house and my kids at the park with the nanny. It feel [sic] amazing.
Ah yes, your magically clean house.
Sex diary? Well, okay, sure, but who cares? As a thoughtless chronicle of the careless exploitation of "the nanny," though, I guess it has some sociological value...?
It's so awkward when they bring their nannies to your brunch.
BRANDY YOU'RE A FINE GIRL YOU'RE OBEDIENT AND YOUR MEET [BOOK OF COMMON PRaYER SENSE] BUT YOUR LIFE YOUR FEED AND YOUR LARRY IS THE TWEET
Huh. Do they publish this sort of thing often? Is it part of the brand that it's always reportage by hissable unemployed wealthy women in NYC, or do they sometimes break it up with hissable mid-six-figures entertainment industry men in LA?
It's a regular feature, but usually there's at least a nominally more interesting hook.
18 is comment of the year; you can all go home now.
What's the saying, "If you marry for money, you'll work for every penny?" Something like that. I only read some of the piece, but basically, looking good and being available for sex are her job, so the fact that it reads like a work diary is entirely appropriate.
Nobody tell neB about the alienated ennui of twenty-first century urban post-industrialized life!
"Do who you love and you'll never work a day in your life."
Ogged is correct in both 28 and 29
25 or 6 to 4.
Bang on the editor all you want, but I'm certain she removed a line like "My husband revels in his predictability. Every night at 9:30, he comes to me and says: 'Oh, would you look at the time. It's already...sex o'cock.'"
I thought it was interesting. It was short and easy to read and seemed like I was being given a chance to see how another person lives and thinks. The lack of style in the writing and that she didn't seem clever or original in any way, made it seem more authentic and typical of her class.
I guess I am into banal.
||
Instead, folks should read RBG's excellent opinion in Timbs issued this morning. The case is so easy to decide, you wonder why the Indiana Supreme Court even bothered to get it wrong. Well edited too!
I'm disturbed to find myself a little bit open to Justice Thomas' view (in his concurring opinion) that incorporation ought to be considered under privileges and immunities, rather than due process. I'm not convinced that the Court's decision in Dred Scott derives from this confusion, though. And saying that the confusion spawns the most "notoriously incorrect" rulings, and then citing only Roe and Dred Scott drives me back to due process. It doesn't make a difference in this case which part of the 14th Amendment you use to reverse the Indiana Supreme Court, and I kind of wonder whether it would make a difference in any case?
Thoughts?
|>
37: Wait, is Thomas saying that better 14th Amendment jurisprudence would have prevented Dred Scott?
It reads as completely prosaic ritzy daily life, punctuated by an occasional gaping void with the post-it "and then we have sex" slapped over it. Why did anyone think it was worth linking around in the first place? I know I saw the headline at least once before.
Thomas is arguing that the substantive due process approach is flawed, and can be seen as such given Dred Scott and more recent rulings he doesn't like (Roe, Obergefell). Although the term "substantive due process" is recent, arguments of that form predate the 14th Amendment and were used to decide Dred Scott. The majority found that taking property without due process of law to be unconstitutional, even if that property happened to be a person. The modern defense is that the antebellum court used it incorrectly; at a minimum, if you accept it, then you should also accept that state-allowed slavery is a significant imposition on a person's rights in the first place.
That being said, I guess it is kind of weird to use the due process clause when the privileges and immunities clause is right there and more straightforward.
Ginni & Clarence Thomas diary: Today we screwed as many people as possible. Then we had sex.
There was a time when this post would have resulted in 900 comments on the correct number of times a couple should have sex each week.
Instead, folks should read RBG's excellent opinion in Timbs issued this morning.
RBG in Timbs? She really is cool.
I finally read it, and I am totally the target audience.
Hot take: I think the relentless mildly-content-drone was actually very realistic and didn't drive me crazy, compared to fake intense emotions for the sake of having a narrative arc. I don't totally dislike her, either, mostly because she seems self-aware (and meta-self-aware). That said, I wouldn't want to be friends with her.
"Mildly-content-drone", not "Mildly-content-drone"
That being said, I guess it is kind of weird to use the due process clause when the privileges and immunities clause is right there and more straightforward.
I'm not familiar with this argument (and I'm too lazy to dig up whatever Thomas said). I understand the "due process" application to this case, because I understand how due process is used to incorporate the Constitution into governing the actions of states.
A guess: "privileges and immunities" does the same thing more elegantly? Is that it?
45.1: What makes it interesting / worth having read to you?
48: Somewhere between schadenfreude and a touch of envy that she seems to have so much time while dealing with some of the same broad strokes of life that I deal with. (Not the nightly broad strokes. That just seemed an awful chafing chore, although I'm vaguely fascinated that she doesn't resent it more.)
I don't want to read any more of this daily diary exactly, but if she had a blog with some reflections built in, I'd read it.
Is there more to that than that she doesn't have to work and she has servants? I can see how that would be nice, but it's not particularly interesting -- it doesn't get me to the same solution for myself.
Probably basically! I mean, I have never known a single person in Heebieville, no matter how distant an acquaintance, with a nanny. (Lots of active grandparents, but no nannies.) (The only nanny I've ever specifically known of, anywhere - hometown, Austin, grad school or college friends, etc - is the one employed by my Dunning-Kruger brother, when their kids were little.)
I don't want to overstate it - I'm not overly fascinated by her - but I didn't loathe reading it as much as I loathed reading about the Logickiest guys.
Feather Factor is a blog of a fabulously wealthy former-techie-turned-novelist who seems down-to-earth despite hemming and hawing about buying a second Hermes bag at $3K, and I like reading that blog.
I think the relentless mildly-content-drone was actually very realistic
It's not even at that level of content (CONtent, yunnerstan) that I'm turned off. A mildly contented drone could still have been written with something approaching a personality or, I don't know, skill or style. It reads as if it's the work of someone with no inner life. It's relentlessly superficial, not so much content. Anyway, I hated it an purely aesthetic grounds.
It reads as if the way they do these diaries is by assigning 1 a week to somebody based on a 1-sentence pitch. And then this one was handed in and they said "That's it? Oh well, up it goes, otherwise we'll have empty space." But they can't do it that way, right? This isn't a weekly newspaper.
I have never read this particular diary series before, but it reads like the editor ordered a daily log of events, which I agree is the least interesting kind of diary. Maybe I just have a high tolerance for diaries.
That said, I wouldn't want to be friends with her.
Leave your team of nannies at home when you visit and you'll be fine.
(I mean, there has never been a medium I've loved more than blogs. I just love a personal diary.)
Maybe talk radio which has pleasingly morphed into podcasts. Talk radio and blogs are my heartbeat.
I don't think I ever knew anyone with a nanny either. It was a small town, though. I also never attended a bar/t mitzvah.
Usually when the The Cut Sex Diary series goes viral it's because it's by a 25-year-old with a vapid life of hooking up and spending $45 on drinks every night, which people hate-read because she is clearly being supported by parents. I don't know what it's like when it doesn't go viral.
I've never attended a bar/bat mitzvah. I know many people who had nannies or have them now. Once, I was at a birthday party for an eleven-year old and I couldn't figure out where there was a German teenager there. Turned out he was the au pair who brought one of the guests.
47 He's been banging on it for years, decades maybe, and I guess now that Gorsuch is joining in, he'll not stop. Who am I kidding -- nothing but embalming fluid would stop him in any event.
I guess the idea is that if you use P&I you'll end up with some different results in some cases -- maybe a lot of cases -- because first you'd have to establish a federal right before you get to say a state is barred from banning/controlling something. Would courts have to 'discover' federal rights where there's nothing obvious? What I'm not clear on is if we'd gone the P&I route for the last century we wouldn't just end up with what is, in DPC terms, Liberty as the federal right we're preventing states from infringing. Does Pierce v. Society of Sisters turn out differently?
It reads as if it's the work of someone with no inner life.
How can you say that? She thinks she's different from her friends, because she's not as shallow and is more self-aware. What is more human than that?
I know a few people with au pairs, and a few with (day) nannies. I'd guess all are doing financially OK -- in the sense of decent professional salaries, but we aren't talking bankers -- but the cost calculation, at least where I live, gets pretty quickly in favour of one if you have more than one kid.
When xelA was little, our child care costs were something like 1200 GBP a month, and could have been higher if my wife didn't have some time off in the week. If you had a couple of kids, and especially if you had three or more, having a full time (in the day, not live in) child-minder/nanny would definitely be cheaper. I know one person who had one who was an NHS speech therapist because, as she had a couple of small kids, and it was cheaper to have one person come to her house and look after the kids than take them to a nursery and pay 3K a month.
As it happens, I know more families where there is a stay at home dad -- because the mother is the higher wage earner -- than I do people with full time paid child-carers, but having one isn't a sign of sybarite luxury.
Fair point. Daycare here, while cripplingly expensive, is on the cheap side, especially with the number of in-home under-the-table daycares.
Kids must stay under the table.
My religion is opposed to mandatory staffing ratios.
Are we talking about her husband again?
especially with the number of in-home under-the-table daycares
Yeah, I bet my next-door-neighbors are inexpensive.
Daycare or kennel. We let the homeowners association pick.
63: But do you know any families in which one parent doesn't work (and is in good health) and they also have full time paid child-carers?
71- I know a couple of people like that and the mothers are just as vapid as the friends described in the article. Even better, they sometimes hire our kids as after-school playmates/babysitters so the kids have someone closer to their age to play with than the nanny.
51: You know me! We had a nanny for maybe eight years? And she was the best ever. But that was a high-earner's indulgence as better than day care because it let Tim have more time with the kids when he was working at home.
Re:71
No. Not even close. I know a few people where one parent doesn't work and they have a day or two of childcare (nursery) for some respite or so they can do a bit part time work at home, I suppose.
My mom had a babysitter for us when I was little. Mom was pregnant, broke her foot, and had three kids under five. I think the first three kids just sucked the calcium right out of her. It wasn't for long because grandma moved nearby that same year.
She barely fell down any stairs and then "snap".
Can I point out that I have a nineteen-year-old daughter (and a seventeen-year-old son), and based on three generations of consistent age at first birth, will plausibly have a grandchild in under a decade. Weird, isn't it?
I guess most doctors recommend you fall down no stairs while pregnant, but I figure it's like drinking and falling down a few stairs in the last trimester is commonly accepted in Europe.
(Both my grandmothers and my mother had first children at 28 -- I had mine at 27, less than two weeks shy of 28. We are a consistent people.)
(Oddly, both my grandmothers and my mother had their first children quite old, while I had mine fairly young. We are consistent, but the American people aren't.)
I guess we got into that social circle because our older two attended a half-day coop because SPouse didn't go back to work full-time until they were in school because it was a wash financially (our state has the highest daycare rates in the country; two kids full time matched her take-home pay.) So you pay for ~4 hours of child care and once a month you have to go be the parent helper (no nanny substitutes allowed) and there are only certain types of family work arrangements that could attend such a school. This is where we met celebrity couple, with the mom who AIHMHB is a super nice person and not stereotypical celebrity mom.
When they turn 25, are you going to start to drop hints?
Nah. I have given them the full sanctimonious "Having children is optional, don't let anyone guilt trip you about it" speech. But, you know, I like babies. So I'd be happy with them staying true to family history.
First prize, these knit booties. Second prize, I leave your portion of the inheritance to the cat.
82: You may have had your first kid young by the standards of your stratum, but not those of Americans as a whole.
When my cousin (an only child) was approaching 30 and still wasn't married, my uncle became obsessed with getting grandchildren. It has to be pretty bad when you're trying to get your teenage nephew to sympathize with your plight. All of my social interactions are awkward, but that one was significantly more awkward.
But it all worked out for him. He died a happy man with a doctor son-in-law, and three beautiful granddaughters.
86: Have I talked about how much I am annoyed by the cats? The cats get nothing! Not a penny, not a catnip mouse.
My dad died with three beautiful granddaughters, but nobody got or married anyone with an M.D., PhD, or even an Ed.D.
The cutie-patootie kitty-witties?
89: Right. You'll have to get a dog again.
One of them spent most of the night trying to claw through my duvet -- enough to kind of wake me up and annoy me, but not enough that I woke up completely enough to get out of bed and lock them out of my room. I can't have a glass of water by my bed because they'll push it over on me. They're horrible furry little bullies.
Cute, admittedly, but trash.
I thought that was just a joke about cats knocking stuff off tables.
KNOCKING THINGS OFF TABLES IS DEADLY SERIOUS BUSINESS.
My technique with cats is just to do whatever they want me to, and to pay close attention to their signals. This way it has taken only five years to teach Ume's cat how to play at disemboweling my wrist with his claws sheathed.
Topically enough, my computer keeps giving me ads about treatment for painful sex. But it turns out they don't mean emotionally.
Anyway, I haven't gone near a cat since I heard they carry depression.
You can just watch videos of cats with no risk.
Witt, if I understand 5 correctly, are you alleging that you believe the original composition to have had engaging verve, only it was reduced to nothingness by an editor? I simply assumed it was written in the first place by someone who has no idea how to write or that writing can even have aesthetic qualities and can only reproduce the blandness she's already encountered.
It's not so much that. Most people are not great writers, so it may not have been that great to begin with. But there's honestly no way to tell, because I'm 100% sure it was fed through the homogenization filter of Editorial.
My proposed workaround (dictating and then cleaning it up) still doesn't produce good WRITING, per se, because spoken storytelling is genuinely different from written, but IME it definitely does produce a more authentic (and to me often more compelling) authorial voice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/style/choupette-lagerfeld-inheritance.html
That article is about a man named Karl, Barry.
This is why Kurt Marx said the working class needs to rise up.
I'm sure he was curt on occasion.
The linked piece is utterly pointless. The headline is particularly irritating given that, if you are a mom, and you have sex with your husband five (possibly six) nights out of seven, you are not in fact a "mom who has sex with her husband every night". That's just SIMPLE FUCKING MATHEMATICS.
Pun not intended, but it is indeed simple mathematics, and about fucking.
82: My father and I were the same age, 32, when our first children were born. Obviously this isn't as interesting a fact as the mother's age at birth, but I still thought it was cool.
Even less interesting: My grandfathers, my father, my son, and myself were the same age at our birth.
Each of us were just born once. All Catholic.
My parents were born two days apart which means we always did a combined birthday for them, like when you're born near Christmas you only get one set of presents.
My sister's, mother's and father's birthdays are within 3 weeks of each other. Far enough apart that they have separate celebrations, close enough together that I hate shopping for them.
Next year I will be able to say "I remember my father being as old as I am now". This feels like a bit of a milestone.
Obviously if you get enough of your parents in a room some of them will share a birthday.
123: A few years ago, a similar thought occurred to me.
You remember my father being as old as I am now?
123: hmm, that happened when I was 26 I think. 27 maybe, depending upon the fallibility of early memory. I love my dad, but he was pretty much a charming wastrel then. smoking up all day, selling weed, being at home while my mom worked, but she pretty much still did all the housework. however, he is and was an amazingly talented musician, and always had some cool project going, like making shrimp nets. he could cast them very well, also, and it's hard to spin them out into a perfect circle floating for a second atop the water and then falling in all at once under the lead weights at the edge. I remember walking on one he had spread out on our screened porch. peculiar, unforgettable sensation, and he let me drink some beer. maybe not best practice care of five-year-olds, but it was cool. he's difficult but is fundamentally an awesome dad.
51: also, heebie, you know me! I only just started not having a live-in maid/nanny this year! it turns out that even though it feels incredible for someone to vacuum and mop all your floors every day, it's not incredible enough to warrant actually doing so oneself. still, AIMHMB, I want it to be the case that after you take your shower and walk around the house the soles of your feet remain baby pink. when it starts to be that they get slightly dirty I become really anxious until I mop everything. I live in fear I will lose control of the cleanliness of the house and it will be impossible to regain. also I want there to be back-up everything. we ran out of jam and I felt incompetent. similarly color-safe bleach. it's barely possible I get manic about these things. as far as the nanny aspect goes my children are marginally competent now, though they never learned how to do their hair, which became an issue.
123: The milestone that was significant for me was reaching and then passing the age that my father was when he died. That was 6 years ago.
From "rich people banal sex" to "my parents are dead now" in 123 comments still feels too fast somehow.
Next year I will be able to say "I remember my father being as old as I am now". This feels like a bit of a milestone.
When I met Jammies, I was 28 and his mom was 48, and she was 51 when Hawaii was born. It feels weird to be closer to "mother-in-law-age" than to "meet your spouse age". (This does not work for my parents' ages, though.)
I'm just trying to deal with my kids making jokes about jerking off.
You mean writing down the good ones?
134: Have you had the talk about the NMM rules yet?
My ex was 10 years younger than me; we met when he was only four years older than my older teen is now. I always respected the grace with my former MIL accepted me despite my age and foreignness, but now I think she qualifies for sainthood.
My sister, mother, father, and me, all have our birthdays in the same week.
And, my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law share the same birthday, and my wife is a couple of days before.
My mum was 18 when I was born, and my dad was 21. So, I remember them being a _lot_ younger than I am now. My mum was 29 when I started high school. When my parents were the age I am now, I was already about to start my PhD, and my parents had a grandchild -- my nephew -- who was already at school.
This is my parents when I was about 3:
https://i.imgur.com/jcdiIvu.jpg
Which, means, early 20s.
Atossa is still only 3, so I'm still a long way to being able to compare her childhood to anything I remember of my own. My mom is a little older than my dad and Cassandane is more than a little older than me, so in theory I could make some comparisons between them now or soon, but nothing comes to mind and anyways why would I want to.
I'm not sure how interesting comparisons between my childhood and Atossa's will ever be, anyway. Technology and generational stuff aside (AISIMHB, I think people wildly overstate what a generational cohort says about the people in them), she's an only child and I have a younger sister, and I grew up in the middle of nowhere and she's in a fairly major city. I might never in all my life look at her and say "Wow, when I was your age I already had been doing X for years" or vice versa, not because of personal development or social changes, just because she lives in a rowhouse and I lived on a former farm.
Now we're down to only two Beatles.
Which way is the wind blowing when Moby can't tell a monkey from a beetle?
129 last - the ideal window for learning how to braid your own hair (french, dutch, mermaid, rope, etc. etc. etc.) is when you are in full flow of the adolescent need to listen to the same pop songs 86 bazillion times in a row in your room for a couple of hours with your heart bursting from the livingness of your life and then its great to have something to do repeatedly with your hands.
its great to have something to do repeatedly with your hands.
I said I was tired of hearing about masturbation.
139- You started high school at 11? Or is the definition of high school different there?
146: high school = secondary school. Primary is from 5 to 11, more or less. Secondary from 11 to 17 or 18.
Also:
Our girls have birthdays in the same week, spaced four years apart.
Our boys have birthdays in the same week, spaced four years apart.
The two sets are offset by a year and a half. I completely love the symmetry more than is reasonable.
daD nattarGcM was one chiselled mofo.
My son and his oldest cousin, who are currently neighbors in Chicago (and whom I'll see this weekend!) share a birthday, 11 years apart, a couple of days before my dad's in July. My wife, mom, s-i-l and I are all clustered over a couple of weeks in March.
Further to 147. They tried middle schools about a generation ago; decided they didn't work and mostly phased them out. There may be one or two left in particularly backward areas.
They tried middle schools about a generation ago; decided they didn't work and mostly phased them out.
I went to the same school from grades 7-12, and my kids from 6-12, and I think it's better than breaking out middle school separately. Everything I hear about middle school as a locus of trauma didn't happen, and I think it was partially because at the middle-school age we were very obviously children, scuttling around at knee level among our elders (who weren't bothering with us because it was beneath their dignity). It kept the stakes of everything feeling low.
That makes sense. I'm sure the theory goes that you don't want 11th grade guys have sex with 7th grade girls, but the effect is to just remove perspective away from 7th and 8th graders about their maturity in the grand scheme of things.
I mean give them a sense of heightened top-of-the-tower, instead of anchoring them near the bottom.
Our school is K-8 and high school is 9-12. All other schools in the district used to be K-8 but recently switched to K-5 that feed into a smaller number of middle schools (which all merge into one big high school).
Fortunately we don't have any problems with 8th graders sleeping with 2nd graders.
Omg. So, yesterday morning Hawaii told me she had something to get off her chest. A friend of her in her class has been absent all week. Her teacher told them that his dad had died, his mother is in the hospital because she's pregnant with twins, and so the kid is staying with his grandmother. (We know the kid, and his younger brother - they've been on various soccer teams that Jammies has coached and our kids have played on.)
It turns out that the dad was the culprit of an awful murder-suicide that happened over the weekend (with an ex-girlfriend, not the mother).
I know this is bog-standard in the world of domestic violence worst case scenarios, but: ugh, those poor children. What a nightmare.
Yikes. That's going to follow those kids their whole life.
And Hawaii knew the whole story? that really is grim.
Nope, Hawaii doesn't know the whole story. I figured it out from the newspaper article - the murderer has the same name as the son.
Re: 150
I haven't seen him for a while (we rarely end up in the same city/country at the same time), but he looked like a bald grey version of that until very recently. He has that Iggy Pop thing where his body is 40 years younger than his face.
159, 160: Horrible and will always be with them, but kids can be incredibly resilient. I hope they, mom, and Grandma are getting lots of love and support, because that's what will pull them through.
It would be really weird to grow up with people knowing your dad did that, especially if friends and relatives of the victims were around.
Yes, but the kids are victims too, and life is endlessly more complicated than one horrific act. Little day-by-day bits of support and space to process what happened can heal a lot of trauma, even if it leaves a big scar too.
